Aakash 2 tablet launched in India at Rs 1,130

Datawind in association with the HRD Ministry has launched Aakash 2 - the new version of India's low-cost tablet Aakash, which was trashed by both users and reviewers for its poor performance.
The new Aakash 2 tablet is available at a subsidised price of Rs 1,130 for Indian students, while Datawind is delivering the tablet to the HRD Ministry at Rs 2,263.
The second version of low cost tablet Aakash was launched in Delhi on Nov 11,2012 Sunday by President Pranab Mukherjee.

 About 22 crore students will get the device across the country in the next five to six years. By coming Monday alone, 20,000 devices are expected to reach out to the students.
The first one lakh devices will be provided to students of engineering colleges and universities and subsequently these will be distributed to others.

The new Aakash 2 tablet comes engineered with a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, while the original Aaaksh tablet was powered by a 366 MHz processor. The Aakash 2 tablet has a a 7-inch capacitive display with four multi-touch points. The screen has a resolution of 800×480 pixels. The previous version of Aakash had a 7-inch resistive touch screen.

The upgraded Aakash runs Android 4.0 operating system, whereas its predecessor had Android 2.2 OS
The Aakash 2 sports a front-facing VGA camera, and has built in Wi-Fi connectivity. The new tablet has 512 MB RAM and internal memory of 4GB, which is expandable up to 32GB using a micro SD card. The tablet is said to offer around four hours of battery time.

Compared to the previous version of the Aakash tablet, which proved to be a dud, the company has now upgraded some of the key features to enhance the user experience.

The commercial version of the Aakash 2 unit is branded as UbiSlate 7Ci, and is available for purchase on DataWind's website at Rs 3,500

Suneet Singh Tuli(right), CEO of Datawind, presents UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon(left) an Aakash2 tablet computer during a meeting at United Nation headquarters