Were you tempted by the Rs 2,900 Akash tablet, or the Rs 3,250 Penta tablet from BSNL, but put off by their resistive touch-screen displays?
Help is at hand, in the form of Wishtel, an Indian company that has brought in a decent capacitive-touch tablet at Rs 5,500.
The Wishtel IRA and ‘IRA Thing’ tablets are not exactly the top of the line, when it comes to the specifications, but they may be a better option for those looking for a cheap tablet because of the capacitive touch option.
While Akash and Penta have strong specifications, especially as they have processors built on ARM version 7 and 6 respectively, the IRA tablets have the advantage of having capacitve touch screens.
On the other hand, IRA has ARM-9 cores, based on the version 5 of the ARM line-up. The IRA also has a lower resolution display compared to the Penta, as its 7-inch display has a width of 480 pixels (like Akash), compared with 600 pixels on Penta.
Another point of difference is HDMI. While Penta has the facility, useful for connecting your tablet to your LCD TV or computer monitor, the other two don’t have it.
That said, the IRA, at 512 MB, has twice the application memory (RAM) as the other two. Higher RAM allows programs to run more smoothly and may compensate a bit for the older design of IRA’s 800-MHz processor.
Despite having a smaller battery (2,800 mAh vs 3,200 on Akash and 3,000 mAh on Penta), the IRA is touted to have a battery life of 3 to 4 hours, according to Wishtel.
Another crucial feature is that you don’t have to know English to use the tablet. The IRA comes with support for nearly all Indian languages, unlike most tablets in the market today.
The tablets are built on Via Technologies’ Wondermedia Prizm WM8650 platform and start at Rs 4,000.
Specifications
CPU 800Mhz
Memory 512 MB
Operating System Google Android 2.2 / 2.3
Display Size 7″ TFT LCD Capacitive Touch
Resolution 800×480
RAM 512 MB RAM
Built-in Flash 4 GB
WLAN Built-in 802.11b/g WLAN
3G external 3G support
Card slot X 1
Battery Pack 2800 mAh
Battery Life 3 -4 hours
PHYSICAL SPEC Dime nsion 20.3*13.7*1.45cm
Weight 0.37KG
G Sensor Yes