On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 12:28, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <parakara.ghoda@gmail.com> wrote:

Aakash is basically an Android tablet. So if we create an offline version of Wikipedia for all Android devices, [India specific], I guess that should do? Right?

This version of Aakash uses Android- the one that Datawind is making for the first pilot run (100,000 devices).

The next version of Aakash will *likely* use Android too. There is no guarantee that Datawind will make that version- the price point will be determined by a government bidding process and multiple manufacturers (all those who pass the technical evaluation) will be invited to manufacture and sell tablets at that price point- on a "rate card contract" system.

There are efforts underway to port Debian to the tablet, as some folks at the IITs/MHRD aren't too happy with the reliance on Google. The current version does not have the Android Market- despite talks with Google. This shouldn't be a problem for Wikipedia-offline for the tablet though, since that will be FOSS.

Jessie has spoken to the professor from IITB (Kannan Moudgalya) who is on the standing committee of the National Mission on Education through ICT (under which the Aakash project, among others, falls). She has also spoken to the CEO of one of the other manufacturers- Datawind is only one of many companies that are bidding for this project- they won the bid for the pilot run. I have not been following this project for the past two weeks or so (since the WikiConference)- the bidding for the second version of Aakash was on at the time. I'm not aware of what the current status is. I'll be visiting IITB during Scipy this weekend, so I'll know more then.

About offline-Wikipedia, work has already commenced on porting Kiwix to Android (3 weeks ago by Emmanuel, IIRC).

tl;dr: The foundation is talking to folks behind the Aakash tablet.

@Hisham, Jessie: Any updates on getting the sample tablets from the manufacturer?