General Mobile wins Turkey’s tablet tender

ISTANBUL - Anatolia News Agency

General Mobile General Manager Muzaffer Gölcü (L) and Gençcell Technology Board Chair Sebahattin Yaman (R). AA photo

General Mobile has won the PC tablet tender for Turkey’s massive information technology project called Fatih to be launched in schools nationwide, bringing high technology “smart classrooms” to the country.

The company won the tender by offering 599 Turkish Liras tablet PCs for nearly 15 million students, said Muzaffer Gölcü, general manager of General Mobile Turkey, at a press conference Jan. 20. Samsung was unsuccessful in its bid for the project.

“We will follow the tender requirements and fine tune our manufacturing capacity accordingly,” he added.

The company will start manufacturing the 8.9 inch tablet PCs this year. “We will deliver around 4,000 tablets this month and another 30,000 tablet PCs next month, both of which are part of the pilot phase,” Gölcü said.

General Mobile will launch the pilot project of training both students and teachers on information technology, as well as identifying the needs of classrooms, with a team of 100 people visiting schools across the country.

“We will develop new software and applications according to the needs of the students and teachers,” he said, adding that teachers would be able to monitor students as the software system would enable students to download material with teacher approval. “Tablet PCs will be easily connected to the Internet in the classrooms and update all the information needed,” he said.

If the project goes beyond General Mobile’s production capacity, Gölcü revealed that it might partner with other firms, but he’s confident General Mobile will be able to supply the necessary number of tablets with no difficulty. “We are already working on increasing our production capacity to meet the demand,” he said.

“With this project Turkey will become a technology hub in the region,” said Sebahattin Yaman, board chairman of Gençel Technology, at the meeting.

Vestel signed an agreement Jan. 9 with the Transportation Ministry for the production of 84,921 smart boards for a fee of approximately 339.6 million liras.