If touchscreen iPad imitations are bound to steamroller traditional keyboard laptops, India’s human resource development office is ready with its Sakshat to give iPad a run for its money. The Linux-based Sakshat, introduced July 23, is slated to reach $35 production costs by 2011, and Development Minister Kapil Sibal is confident the Sakshat eventually can be manufactured for $20 – some in the ministry are aiming at $10, though there was some dispute over whether a viable touchscreen tablet can move below a $20 bill of materials.
India has promoted an internal development project to challenge One Laptop Per Child, similar to the Craig Venter/Human Genome Project competition, ever since OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte demonstrated the first $100 laptop in 2005. Sibal made little headway asking private companies to develop a cheaper platform, and eventually promoted component development as a contest among India’s technical universities. The resultant tablet computer carried the added bonus of being a true India-developed product, though it relies on common standards.
Students at the India Institute of Technology and India Institute of Science jointly defined a platform with ARM Cortex A8 or Rockchip processors, 2 Gbytes of memory, a 10.5-in. multitouch color screen, Wi-Fi b and g, Ethernet, a digital camera, and a PDF reader. Unlike iPad, the system will offer compatibility to Adobe Flash, and will use OpenOffice.org and open document formats. The Linux kernel has been optimized for cloud storage of applications, hence the Sakshat only offers an SD memory card outside its main memory – there is no disk drive. This significantly reduces power dissipation to a reported 2W, but the Indian government plans to make it even easier for rural India use by developing a solar-power version of the tablet.
Several Taiwan ODM and component conglomerates are interested in manufacturing the Sakshat. Until quality control in high-volume manufacturing is ironed out, we won’t know how reliable the computer can be, but at a price range of $20 to $35, we’re sure Sibal will find that “the computer for the rest of us” may have massive global appeal …
Loring
