Low-Cost Indian Tablet Project Falls To Corruption 144
symbolset writes "The first Aakash tablet proposed for India schools has failed. Datawind managed to deliver the $45 Android tablet as reported here previously, but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold. Facing a loss in revenue it's turning into a disaster for the small Canadian company as they are now proving unable to deliver both the Aakash tablet and the parallel retail product. Senior executives have begun to flee. The company has presold a great many tablets, and delivery failure reports are beginning to mount. Is this the Phantom console of this decade?"
Re:Money first (Score:5, Informative)
Wtf does Google have anything to do with manufacturing and government requirements issues? Android is software, all the problem are hardware. If you are gonna blindly bash Google, at least keep it relevant unless this is an attempt to troll.
For those of you who are to lazy to RTFA.
1) Government wants $45 laptop to have military grade ruggedness (of which was not stated until late into the game). Quote from the article, ' The criteria included being able to withstand four inches of rain, enduring shock tests when “mounted in a vehicle,” and when subject to “sudden acceleration, braking, or turning while transporting the units.” ' Normally I wouldn't consider this that bad but for a $45 laptop, I can definitely see an issue.
2) The manufacturer "signed an agreement with I.I.T. Rajasthan to manufacture what Mr. Tuli said he believes is a rival low-cost tablet." This side seems to be a mess of Corporate political issues. You can read the article for more on this yourself.
Short version (Score:5, Informative)
From what I can tell, they got the tender, did all the groundwork, then the group they were collaborating with came out with new impossible to achieve specs, backed up by the government, and their subcontractor wandered off to create a competing product.
What a pity, but it looks like they've been had.
Re:Money first (Score:5, Informative)
Hate to tell you. Linux doesn't have a microkernel. Hardware/driver failures crash the system (Kernel panic).
Correct attribution of failures is a major feature of microkernels.
That said hybrid kernels (including windows) do OK except the components that run in kernel (mostly video). Blue screens are much less frequent then they used to be.
Re:incomeptent contracts != corruption (Score:5, Informative)
incomeptent contracts != corruption
Breach of faith means that somebody failed to meet their commitments. That can mean that they signed up to do things that they later found out were harder than they thought. That's incompetence. Or more often it means that they knew they wouldn't come through and took your money anyway.
The fact that they were paid in advance for hardware tells me it's more likely corruption/fraud than plain incompetence, but often you get the incompetence rolled into a fraudulent deal.
Re:Nice try (Score:5, Informative)
> If you want to pay for quality, you can get a quality Android device.
It is more like: if you pay for quality, you *may* get a quality Android device, but you wont know until much later. Some manufacturers promise support and upgrades, but never deliver. In fact none of the Android manufacturers delivers consistently decent (not even outstanding) support.
Re:Money first (Score:2, Informative)
I finally gave up supporting my Mom's old Vista computer (marginal hardware) and installed Ubuntu. Everything works great (including sound and WiFi) with standard install. Performance is snappy. I can also support here using Remote Desktop (not needed so far).
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)