So Aakash 4 is going to be a reality after all - the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has put up a proposed technical specifications for the Aakash IV and invited comments from interested stakeholders on vendor neutrality, tablet usability and functionality until July 12, 2013. The department says that these specifications were formulated by a sub-committee of technical experts and these specifications have been developed in order to have a device at a low cost. The specifications for Aakash IV include (pdf): Software Requirements - Operating System: Should run on the latest Android version, which is Android 4.2.1 'Jelly Bean' and should be dual bootable with a GNU/Linux (latest Ubuntu) distribution. Maximum cold boot time of 35 seconds, which we feel is little on the higher side. - Software: PDF Viewer, E-Book Reader, text editor, a note taking app and support for office document formats like DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, ODT, ODP, ODS. The department says that the tablet should also have support for Android's DRM system and it should be able to play at least 720p videos. - Indic Language Support: Support for reading and editing capabilities in Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi, Guajarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya, Bihari, Assamese, Bishnupriya ,Manipuri, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Devanagari scripts and languages. Unicode support at OS level and virtual keyboards should be preloaded for above languages. We feel it is a good move to include reading and writing support for Indic languages, however it is yet to be seen on how the virtual keyboard will work. -…
