Introducing the iSlate; A Solar Powered Tablet for the Children of India

While tablets are certainly the hot technology right now, it seems rural Indian kids are the hottest target demographic right now. It started with the Rs. 1,600 computing device aimed at college students. Now it's an iSlate, a solar powered tablet for younger school kids.






The iSlate being designed for rural Indian kids



The iSlate is being developed at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in collaboration with Rice University in the United States. It is designed to be an electronic notepad, especially useful in areas where schools don't have electricity. The chips that allow the tablet to be solar powered are in development by two associations. One is the Institute of Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID) at NTU and Switzerland's Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology. The chips will be similar to those in solar powered calculators.



There's no word on how much this will cost yet or what the specs will be. And like the Rs. 1,600 computing device, questions of availability, repair and practicality arise.

Rumors Whisper iOS 4.2 Is Arriving on Friday

It's entirely possible that your iPad will start multi-tasking soon and you’ll have improved performance on your iPhone 3G, and have features like AirPrint and AirPlay added to all. This big goodie bag aka iOS 4.2 might be delivered this Friday itself.

Coming soon to your iPad: Multitasking!





There’s gossip that an “inside source at AT&T” revealed that the update would be available for download on Friday. Now Apple has this record of preceding an iOS update with an iTunes update. So that makes the iTunes 10.1 slated for tomorrow (11th Nov). Developers had been asked a week ago to submit apps for iOS 4.2.



It must be noted that these are just rumors and there’s no grounded evidence for them, but there’s nothing wrong in keeping our hopes up.