Technology Up To Date

Today, October 5, the manufacturer of Akash, India, has announced the incredibly cheap tablet computing device called ‘Akash’ which means “sky” by the price $35 only. This tablet has been aimed primarily for educational institutions of India and will be available to post-secondary school students in the first phase and distance education. Tablet’s commercial variant will be launched at the end of November 2011. The Indian government hopes that the power of DataWind will be enough to produce 700 tablets per day.

The tablet has been developed by Indian company Data Wind along with Britain, the device uses components from around the world – 35 percent from South Korea, 25 – from China, 16 from the US, 16 from India and rest from other countries. The tablet has follow tech characteristics

LCD screen operated at 800×480 resolution
256 MB RAM and 32GB expandable memory
Wi-Fi access
two USB ports
file formats like .doc, .docx, .pdf, .pptx.
3.5mm standard stereo headphone jack
2100 mAh battery life: 180 minutes

Well, it’s good news and we’re happy for Indian students.

There are environmentally-friendly low emission cars whose pollution level are lower than average.

And then there are the super ultra low emission vehicles – or “SULEVs”.

So how do you define a SULEV?

The magic figure is 90%. A “super ultra low emission vehicle” is a USA classification for conventionally powered or petrol-electric hybrid cars designed to produce much lower emissions of different categories of air pollution, which are typically 90% less than that of an equivalent ordinary petrol-powered car for the defined pollution categories.

There are lots of ways cars can achieve SULEV status – but perhaps the most common way is via hybrid technology. And the number of hybrids available is growing all the time.

Of all the various car manufacturers around the world that are producing cars of SULEV status, it is perhaps Honda that takes the crown.

Honda has been producing SULEV cars for over a decade now. Back in the year 2000, the Honda Insight CVT version attained the SULEV rating, whilst the company’s factory-built Civic GX model, which runs on compressed natural gas remains in a category all of its own.

In fact, the Civic GX has achieved the ranking of cleanest internal combustion engine on the road; winning the accolade of the “Greenest Car of 2011” by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy – the eighth year in a row that the car has been awarded the prize.

Honda still only makes a few thousand of this cleanest of the clean SLEV cars each year, but the company’s hybrid SULEVs are growing like in popularity.