$35 Indian Tablet Has Until March 31st To Ship or Be Cancelled 46
damitr writes "With a lot of fanfare the Indian Government had launched a $35 tablet named Aakash (The Sky). Despite skepticism, the government went ahead with the project. But delays in production and deployment of the tablet have left the project in risk of failure. The manufacturer has been unable to supply the required 100,000 units, and a deadline of March 31 has been set. The new minister Pallam Raju says: 'Aakash is only a tablet... there are other such devices as well. While work will continue to develop it and increase its productivity, manufacturing is obviously a problem.'"
For what it's worth, they did manage to ship 17,000 of them. It looks like meeting the deadline is impossible and the $35 tablet is dead.
Easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
They should just outsource production to Ind... no wait...
No surprise (Score:2, Funny)
It's engineers and target customers were too busy shitting in the streets to bother.
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...
At $35 for a 7" touchscreen tablet, how much cheaper can you get on parts? A Fisher-Price "tablet" [fisher-price.com] (no touch screen, no shift key, has a "10" key instead of a "0," but it does have a light-up LCD screen that changes color) costs $25, and even then consumers in the two-to-five-year-old bracket are refusing to use it because they keys are too cheaply made. What "cheaper parts" could the sub-subcontractors possibly swap in? Horse meat [wikipedia.org]? Melamine [wikipedia.org]?
I can see the reviews now: "Bought these for my kids, but they leak some kind of liquid. Kids won't touch them, but the cat loved it. The cat's dead now, vet said his kidneys failed, so at least I'm saving money on cat food."