Good Mornin', fine folks. It's 6 am and I'm awake. Wide awake.
I've been seeing a lot of 6 ams lately. Not because I wake up early, but became it's usually the time I sleep. Not today, I have a DLP exam in 3 hours - and I'm hungry as well. One of the bad things about IIIT is the lack of eating options from 2 am to 12 pm, excluding the morning breakfast.
Anyway, since this blog is supposed to be more tech-oriented than a personal diary rant, I'll talk about the Aakash tablet in this post. We had Prof. Vijay from IIT Rajasthan visiting the institute yesterday. He gave a brief introduction of the tablet (which I missed, thanks to me assuming that events in IIIT will be their usual unpunctual self, and reached 30 minutes late). And then there was a hands on demo. I couldn't lay my hands on the device.
I did, however, stay for 30 minutes after I came, and observed. The tablet hardware is nothing to write home about, a 350 Mhz Conexant processor, a 840x400px screen and other standard stuff - nothing amazing. What's amazing is that they managed to produce these devices for ~Rs. 2,000. That's one-fifth the price of the cheapest tablet I know of, the Kindle Fire. The government isn't wrong in prioritizing arming citizens with productive tools over a Super AMOLED+ screen. If you're keen to know - the touch was pretty basic (resistive) and the screen looked somewhat washed out.
From what I saw and heard, the professor who came for the demo wasn't very well-versed with the tablet and it's development. I'd have loved to ask him if the tablet would allow me to play with custom ROMs, but he didn't seem the right kind of guy to ask. Let's hope Koush and other fine folks at xda-developers get interested in this device and at-least, figure out how to unlock the bootloader. I love playing around with my Nexus S - it's currently running on a custom ROM, Cyanogen Mod 7.1 - but for a newb like me, risking a 20k phone is pretty scary.
That reminds me, I'll put up a blog post on rooting my Nexus S sometime soon. I know I promise a lot that I fail to deliver, but my end-semester exams are almost over (the last exam is Computer Programming, and there's not a lot to study in it).
Wish me luck. Good day!
EDIT: I also had some thoughts on startups I want to share - I saw the guys from MyDrona (a IIIT startup) talking to the prof after the interaction. Maybe sometime later. :). This was more of a personal reminder.
PS: Don't count on the specs and stats used in this post to be accurate. This is not a news report. They're approximate enough to convey the feeling/idea.
I've been seeing a lot of 6 ams lately. Not because I wake up early, but became it's usually the time I sleep. Not today, I have a DLP exam in 3 hours - and I'm hungry as well. One of the bad things about IIIT is the lack of eating options from 2 am to 12 pm, excluding the morning breakfast.
Anyway, since this blog is supposed to be more tech-oriented than a personal diary rant, I'll talk about the Aakash tablet in this post. We had Prof. Vijay from IIT Rajasthan visiting the institute yesterday. He gave a brief introduction of the tablet (which I missed, thanks to me assuming that events in IIIT will be their usual unpunctual self, and reached 30 minutes late). And then there was a hands on demo. I couldn't lay my hands on the device.
I did, however, stay for 30 minutes after I came, and observed. The tablet hardware is nothing to write home about, a 350 Mhz Conexant processor, a 840x400px screen and other standard stuff - nothing amazing. What's amazing is that they managed to produce these devices for ~Rs. 2,000. That's one-fifth the price of the cheapest tablet I know of, the Kindle Fire. The government isn't wrong in prioritizing arming citizens with productive tools over a Super AMOLED+ screen. If you're keen to know - the touch was pretty basic (resistive) and the screen looked somewhat washed out.
From what I saw and heard, the professor who came for the demo wasn't very well-versed with the tablet and it's development. I'd have loved to ask him if the tablet would allow me to play with custom ROMs, but he didn't seem the right kind of guy to ask. Let's hope Koush and other fine folks at xda-developers get interested in this device and at-least, figure out how to unlock the bootloader. I love playing around with my Nexus S - it's currently running on a custom ROM, Cyanogen Mod 7.1 - but for a newb like me, risking a 20k phone is pretty scary.
That reminds me, I'll put up a blog post on rooting my Nexus S sometime soon. I know I promise a lot that I fail to deliver, but my end-semester exams are almost over (the last exam is Computer Programming, and there's not a lot to study in it).
Wish me luck. Good day!
EDIT: I also had some thoughts on startups I want to share - I saw the guys from MyDrona (a IIIT startup) talking to the prof after the interaction. Maybe sometime later. :). This was more of a personal reminder.
PS: Don't count on the specs and stats used in this post to be accurate. This is not a news report. They're approximate enough to convey the feeling/idea.
