Thai schools get 1m tablets

Thailand bought one million tablet computers from a Chinese company for its primary school students, fulfilling one of the government's campaign promises, News24 reports.

The $82 million purchase was signed between Thailand's Information and Communication Technology Ministry and China's Shenzhen Scope Scientific Development Company.

TabTimes says the eventual aim, according to the contract between the company and the Thai ministry, is for one million tablets to be delivered to Grade 1 primary school students, with the first tablets arriving this July.

TabTimes has previously reported on Thailand's tablet plans, with the country at first holding talks with Datawind - the vendor behind the Aakash tablet in India - before contracting the little-known Scope for, initially, 860 000 tablets. Prior to that, news also broke on how the government was preparing to spend $70 million on 900 000 tablets, which, at around $75 per unit, makes this deal about $7 million more expensive.

Digital Trends reports that Thailand is courting Shenzhen Scope for the hardware, which costs $81 per unit, Android Community notes. The Scopad SP0712 has some impressive specs, all things considered: a seven-inch screen, a 1.5GHz single-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. Best of all, they'll be running Ice Cream Sandwich, presumably mostly unmodified from the publicly available source code.

Currently, the manufacturer is reserving a large portion of its capacity just for Thailand, pumping out 24 000 tablets every day. As the country's demands increase, the company will increase its production.