NEW DELHI: IIT Bombay has developed a 10-inch
netbook, which it claims could be the world's cheapest, at around Rs 6,000. The
netbook, conceived during the institute's work with the low-cost Akash tablet,
will be unveiled in the second week of February. "We wanted a device that
would make it easy for people to 'create' information.
The netbook was born out of this desire,"
says professor Kannan Moudgalya at IIT Bombay. He explains that while a tablet
is useful to retrieve information, a netbook can create it, through processes
such as programming and data entry.
The IIT Bombay team has worked on designing
the netbook's specifications besides creating the OS image and the accompanying
software bundle.
"One of the mandates of the low cost tablet project was to continue to do
research and development on affordable access-cum-computing devices," says
Moudgalya.
The project's objective was to understand its
shortcomings and address them in the next product. In a bid to address the
needs of students and to drive information creation, the team at IIT Bombay
thought it was important to have a fully functional keyboard as opposed to a
virtual keyboard, more battery time, a larger screen size (10 inches as
compared to a 7-inch screen on a tablet), greater memory, more storage, a
normal USB slot (not a micro USB), while not letting go of the price focus. The
netbook also needed to be light-weight for students to carry comfortably.
"We put in a lot of effort to arrive at
specifications for the hardware — trying out various machines available in the
market, working with different design specifications, and then looking for
manufacturers through a tender process," says Moudgalya.
IIT Bombay has tied up with Delhi-based
company Basic Computers, which has delivered 1,000 netbooks for the pilot
phase.
Under the pilot, IIT Bombay plans to lend
these netbooks to all first year B Tech students at the institute who have to
undergo an introductory programming course, CS 101.
Out of nearly 450 students who are taking this
course in the current semester, close to 100 do not have their own laptops.
The HRD ministry's Akash project, undertaken
during the UPA regime, was marred by launch delays and quality issues.
"With the new government focusing on virtual classrooms, low-cost
computing devices are the need of the hour, but there has to be a focus on
quality. Also, the pricing shouldn't hamper functionality," says Rohin
Kapoor, senior manager education practice at Deloitte.
Moudgalya says the Akash project has been
completed successfully at IIT Bombay's end. One of the objectives of this
project, he says, was to explore the viability of such a low-cost tablet. The
second objective was to bring down the prices of such devices in the market.
"We have achieved both these objectives and it is now with the Directorate
General of Supplies and Disposals for final procurement," he adds.
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