AKASH/UBSLATE : The cheepest Tablet PC

Finally, the much awaited ‘Sakshat Tablet‘ has been launched as ‘Akash’ for $60 (~Rs. 3000) in India. Akash tablet has been jointly developed by India along with Britain based company Data Wind. The tablet will run Google Android 2.2 (Froyo) and features 7″ LCD screen that operates at 800×480 resolution. The tab has 256 MB RAM and 32GB expandable memory slot along with two USB ports. The Akash tablet will ship with 12 month of replacement warranty. The software supports popular file formats like .doc, .docx, .pdf, .pptx. As we guessed in our earlier post, Akash has 3.5mm standard stereo headphone jack.

Akash Tablet - World's Cheapest Tablet For Rs. 3000

The 2100 mAh battery will last for about 3 hours depending upon usage. There are few pre-loaded apps. Unfortunately the tablet won’t be able to download apps from the Android market place.  The tablet will be priced at Rs. 3000 and expected to hit the retail stores in November 2011. The Indian Government will acquire the tablet from Data Wind for about Rs. 2250 and make it available to post-secondary school students in the first phase. In case you’re wondering, yes the tablet has GPRS and WiFi IEEE 802.11 a/b/g.

First comet found with ocean-like water

A recent discovery may add support to the theory that the water on Earth was brought by a rain of comets. Scientists have analyzed the comet Hartley 2, and discovered that ice found on it has the same composition as ocean water. The discovery was made utilizing an orbiting telescope on the Herschel Space Observatory, which can observe organic molecules by reading their far-infrared wavelengths.

"At the time of the Solar System formation there may have been a large reservoir of such comets with the correct ratio that bombarded the earth," says Paul Hartogh of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.

"Life would not exist on Earth without liquid water, and so the questions of how and when the oceans got here is a fundamental one," added University of Michigan astronomy professor Ted Bergin, "It's a big puzzle and these new findings are an important piece." Bergin is a co-investigator on HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Infrared on the Hershel Space Observatory.

Hartley 2 comes from the Kuiper Belt, a zone that is found near Pluto at the edge of the solar system, where there are many more comets which we know little about. The source of Earth's water has been disputed for a long time, with previous theories believing that asteroids where the original water carriers. However, this new discovery strengthens the theory that the water present on Earth was most likely transported by comets from the Kuiper Belt.

"The results show that the amount of material out there that could have contributed to Earth's oceans is perhaps larger than we thought," Bergin said.

Source: Nature Journal