Creating the World's Cheapest Tablet 192
Back in October, we discussed news that India had launched a $35 tablet. Now, JohnWiney writes with a story in the Globe and Mail about the device's development. Quoting:
"Part of the difficulty in engineering such a device is that the underlying goal—that its final price should be within the means of those who can’t afford high-priced tablets—dictates crucial engineering and component decisions. A piece of high-impact-resistant glass, such as the touchscreen face of an iPad, can cost upward of $20. Datawind’s touchscreen glass, which the company had engineered down the street, costs less than $2, though it won’t allow for luxuries like pinch-and-zoom finger swiping. There were also compromises on processing power: Datawind’s 366 megahertz processor costs less than $5, a fraction of the $15-plus price tag on the chips that power iPads and other comparable tablets. And while the decision to run Google’s free Android mobile operating system on the gadget saves money, it requires coders to dig deep into the Linux kernel that underpins the software, tweaking it until it runs smoothly on Datawind’s weaker processor."
Race to the bottom (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, a race to the bottom will always result in a lower-quality experience. It doesn't seem worth it for the compromises made. Amusingly, devices like this get figured into the amorphous statistic of "Android marketshare" in countless forum operating system arguments.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
You're posting this on a forum where a good number of readers are obsessed with Linux. It's not that Linux isn't a great OS (I use it for server-side stuff) but it certainly doesn't provide the polished overall experiences that Microsoft or Apple do.
There is a breakeven point for many people. Those people who are happy to pay $200 for a machine and spend the time getting it to run well with something like Linux even at the expense of a better experience which may cost 6x as much (Apple).
So, if someone cannot or is unwilling to pay $500 for an iPad but may be willing to pay less than $100, it's going to give a much better experience than nothing.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Informative)
Depends a great deal on the distro. I've been using Linux Mint and I've spent very little time trying to fix it, probably similar to how much time I've spent trying to fix Win 7.
OTOH, Arch, Gentoo and similar are aimed at people that are more interested in controlling their complete experience, and probably take more time to maintain.
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It depends heavily on your hardware, too -- especially for laptop systems. Particularly on brand new machines, there's often things that just don't work or don't work by default yet, though these pieces of hardware often have their support (and default setup) improved over the span of a few years -- which, for some people, is just in time to replace their old machine.
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That's a fair point, most of the time I've found that just buying quality components makes a lot of those problems go away. Granted it's not perfect, but for the most part I've found computers that work well on Linux tend to work well on Windows because they've been well designed. A large number of problems I've run into over the years were the result of manufacturers taking shortcuts or using inferior components.
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It depends heavily on your hardware, too
Same thing with popular proprietary systems too like OSX and Android. People don't seem to have a problem with the concept of just buying hardware that these operating systems are intended for so why not do that for Linux without having to make an issue out of it? And, yes, I know Android is Linux.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Funny)
Major flamewar imminent! EVERYONE, GET TO THE BUNKER!
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Major flamewar imminent! EVERYONE, GET TO THE BUNKER!
Major flamewar imminent! EVERYONE, GET TO THE CHOPPA!
FTFY
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You can polish a turd, if you freeze it. Now, I'm not actually saying that Windows or OSX is a polished turd, I'm just saying that if you were to imply that Windows or OSX has a level of polish absent from Linux, it wouldn't be hard to make your argument.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:4, Informative)
Those people who are happy to pay $200 for a machine and spend the time getting it to run well with something like Linux even at the expense of a better experience which may cost 6x as much (Apple).
Speak for yourself. I use Linux because for me it is the better experience. Kind of like for Mac people, OSX is and for windows people, well, windows is. That's a very arrogant attitude you have there.
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All that bling (what you call polish) gets on my nerves. Setting "Windows Classic" is the first thing I've done since XP times. Gnome3 and Unity are too blingy for me too so I run XFCE.
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Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
Well by putting their system reqs at frankly ludicrously low levels what you ended up with is OEMs slapping Linux on machines that frankly would have had trouble running Win98 without hanging and gave Linux a worse view from those that don't know about specs and just look at price. i mean a 366Mhz CPU?
To be fair, I have a 400 Mhz P3 that has performed admirably for a decade or so with effectively zero downtime as a dev server and network monitor for a production server cluster. To say that you can't get significant use from such comparatively scant resources is simply wrong. I manage my expectations... I am not expecting a responsive, HD flash video experience, nor am I expecting to render expressive graphics with a "snappy" experience.
Look at this as a research project: how do you get a good experience at a reduced power level? You aren't going to get a good experience at 366 Mhz, but given just two Moore's law doublings, you are up to 1.5 GHz, roughly in line with today's midline tablet processors. That's just 4 to 6 years away, depending on how you interpret Moore's law.
The lessons learned today will result in a much better experience for future users of both "low end" and more mainstream processors.
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Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
it certainly doesn't provide the polished overall experiences that Microsoft or Apple do.
Nice switch. The Linux variant being discussed by the OP was Android, which is by all accounts pretty polished (the latest version in particular has been widely praised), but your then go on to define your argument against Android based on desktop Linux distributions. Desktop Linux and Android are not the same, so this line of reasoning is completely invalid. I could go on and point out that many people don't care about visual bling, and how it's taken years for Windows and OS X to incorporate support for simple concepts like software repositories that Linux distributions have had for over a decade (do the Windows and Mac app store repositories even do dependency tracking across packages yet?) Linux isn't even a desktop. If you're going to say that something isn't polished, at least tell people what you are talking about - Gnome, KDE, Xfce?
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And DRM'ed software that relies on proprietary software. How many people use Linux for everything except Netflix?
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It is actually not $35 because the company's is asking for $52 each to build it while the government pays the difference.
Also if this were a real retail product, there would be additional mark up etc making it more like a $75 item (number off my ass).
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Then it's not very revolutionary because I can already run down to Big Lots and get a low quality $80 Android 2.2 tablet. I guess the revolutionary part is getting the government to heavily subsidize your product.
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I'd fully expect it to be my main tablet. But I'd only use it to browse the web, and that I could do on a 486 DX2 66MHz. Of course the internet has changed and HD video and flash games, for instance, are off the table, but for IM, e-mail, Wikipedia et al? 366MHz should be enough for everyone.
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My sister's boss got a 100$ digital picture frame (no battery, data is SD) for Christmas. I think a 35$ tablet is more than adequate to replace that.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't seem worth it for the compromises made
So if you're an Indian for whom an iPad costs the equivalent of a year's salary you should go without altogether, rather than have the best-in-breed? Sounds like a plan - Since I can't afford a Porsche I'll stick with walking.
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Because iPod is a new human right.
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Well, for an Apple fanatic, that's a viable choice -- if you're unwilling to sell your kids and cow to buy an iPad 2, you just don't want a tablet bad enough.
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It doesn't seem worth it for the compromises made
So if you're an Indian for whom an iPad costs the equivalent of a year's salary you should go without altogether, rather than have the best-in-breed? Sounds like a plan - Since I can't afford a Porsche I'll stick with walking.
I hate to point out the obvious, but for many people walking is NOT worth the money saved on a bike or used car. I think I could find evidence of this even in India, given a minute to google it...
There quite conceivably could be a table that is FREE, yet still not worth the effort to use it. If this isn't immediately obvious, you're thinking too hard.
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land line phones
Provided that pay phones still exist in a given part of the world in case you need urgent assistance. They have been disappearing in the United States, for example, because so many people own cell phones.
libraries
Which often lack the book you want, resulting in a week(s)-long wait for an interlibrary loan.
talking to friends and neighbors
And pay big bucks for long distance calls to friends and relatives who have moved away.
At least with walking you would know for sure when you would get to your destination
It has become more difficult with urban sprawl putting destinations two hours apart on foot (7 mi; 11 km) or more.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
> You're assuming that any device is necessarily better than no device.
Um, no. He's assuming that the Datawind tablet is better than not being able to use the applications the tablet provides. I know this is hard to understand, but if you need to run an application to help you plant your crops, a device that doesn't happen to have a trendy metal bezel and won't play Angry Birds is still better than not planting your crops.
It's not about the device, it's about access to content.
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I know this is hard to understand, but if you need to run an application to help you plant your crops, a device that doesn't happen to have a trendy metal bezel and won't play Angry Birds is still better than not planting your crops.
I know this is hard to understand, but people already have an application that helps them plant their crops. They've had it for generations. It's called asking the local farmers how to do it.
That is what any new device has to be better than.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Interesting)
Then... I have an idea -- why don't you go tell them that. Someone over there thinks there is a critical need for a device at that price point. It's easy for us first world residents to say they should be buying iPads instead without any appreciation at all for what life is like in that part of the world. The last time I was there, the houseboy slept on the floor in the hallway outside my hotel door, because it was more comfortable than his home. (I asked him.) Away from the cities, the great majority don't have access to any of the things you take for granted -- GPS, cell service, access to the internet. It's a totally different environment. *We* think you're a little nuts for camping outside the AT&T store in the rain waiting to replace your 4 with a 4s. People in *that* part of the world think you're batshit crazy.
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Then... I have an idea -- why don't you go tell them that.
They already know how to run their lives, thank you very much. They don't need me to tell them anything.
It's easy for us first world residents to say they should be buying iPads
I never said anything about anyone buying an iPad. Perhaps you are confusing me with another poster. What I said was, any electronic device that you want people to use (and pay money for) has to be better than the non-electronic methods they already have.... otherwise they won't use it. I don't understand why that is such a difficult concept to get across.
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But you seem pretty content to tell us what we should or should not buy, and what we should be allowed to have, eh?
Here is a clue. One of the many uses for this tablet is to get them on internet, and have educational apps/websites to help teach poor illiterate kids in villages, where there is serious lack of educational material, and even teachers. It is about giving them an opportunity.
Having a c
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But you seem pretty content to tell us what we should or should not buy, and what we should be allowed to have, eh?
You are accusing me of writing things that I never wrote. I never told anyone what they should or should not buy, and I certainly never said anything about what people should not be allowed to have.
Having a cheap affordable tablet can help the government to distribute one in practically every village, and provide current information to those who would not have it otherwise.
That sounds great. The question remains: will a $35 tablet meet that need, or not? I can certainly imagine a $35 tablet that stops functioning after two weeks, or is so slow or unreliable that nobody can get it to do any useful work. Paying $35 for a brick would not do anyone any good.
It is incredible, how an arrogant know-it-all like you, who has no idea whatsoever about the ground realities in India, feels compelled to spout off his patronizing opinions in any case, without understanding the least bit what use these tablets are meant for. (hint : it is not for playing angry birds!).
You really need to deal
A lot of them don't really know what you think (Score:3)
Why are they stuck in poverty?
Sure, part of it is the lack of resources.
But another huge part is lack of information.
Moreover, your talk about them getting information from their neighbors? Many/most of them live in villages where the neighbors don't have a phone, even if they do.
You don't have to have a cutting edge communications device to benefit from a communications device. Calculation and informations storage and retrieval are additional benefits.
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you realize how much more productive the farmers in the US became after they were able to get their hands on the bulletins and advisory pamphlets that the Department of Agriculture put (and still puts) out. Or how much science goes into running a farm. How much information is required for successful farming.
Apparently, you're not familiar with the business of farming and how much of it depends on an up-to-the-minute awareness of market conditions, weather conditions. economic conditions, and forecasts. Even their bank balance.
Having access to a bit of technology that allows them access to a library of information and online data could definitely mean the difference between a farmer making it or failing utterly.
Why don't you let the farmers decide whether or not they need the trendy metal bezel and SIRI or not?
And yes, any device that allows farmers to ask farmers all over the country "how to do it" is better than having them asking only the local farmers. They could get information about pest control, get help with crop diseases and learn about various types of fertilizers. Indeed, the communications capabilities of a basic tablet could help them ask the local farmers and maybe participate in discussions with ALL the local farmers.
I guess you think they all just drive their tractors or mules and meet up down by the barn with hayseeds 'twixt their teeth to tell each other how to plant a potato.
I don't care if they're sustenance farmers in rural India or a Wisconsin dairy farmer with a few thousand heads. They're using tons of data and having access to that data in the form of a handheld tablet could be a real boon for them. Farmers here in the US are probably among the small businesses that make the greatest use of the Internet and personal computing technology. For some of those farmers, the Internet is a literal lifeline.
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I know this is hard to understand, but people already have an application that helps them plant their crops. They've had it for generations. It's called asking the local farmers how to do it.
asking the locals fucking sucks. First, you have to walk around and ask them. Next, they have to be willing to share their information. Also, they have to be willing to share their information with you. It's much more convenient to not only be able to ask large numbers of people from far away your question, but actually to see if anyone else has ever asked your question so that you can just read the answers that are already out there. Being able to occasionally download a wad of books is a decent compromise
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asking the locals fucking sucks./quote.
Yes, I agree. So the bar for making a tablet that is better than doing that should be pretty low. The question remains: For $35, is it possible to make a tablet that meets that bar?
(gratuitous insults ignored)
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I know this is hard to understand, but if you need to run an application to help you plant your crops, a device that doesn't happen to have a trendy metal bezel and won't play Angry Birds is still better than not planting your crops.
It's not about the device, it's about access to content.
If you REALLY need a a computer to help you plant crops, then couldn't you do far more for the same price or the same for less with a stationary computer?
You guys are really stretching your something is better than nothing logic here, there are lots of useless things in the world...
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:4, Interesting)
Now would be a good time for you to propose a low-tech alternative to a cheap tablet that holds 20,000 books about the sciences, history, the arts - that promotes literacy and hygiene and medicine. It should include instructions for various good practices such as sustainable agriculture, clean well digging and sanitary sewage practices, mortuary and food preparation practices among other things - in native language or with a suitable translation engine. All subjects introductory to advanced in math, chemistry, biology, mechanical and electrical engineering and history must be included. It must contain enough information to be able to uplift an entire village out of the stone age and into the space age - in a 7" tablet form factor that can be hidden, trekked across the desert and charged by laying it in the sun.
Ideally this low-tech solution should weigh less than half a kilogram and cost less than $35 - durable and disposable enough to smuggle into or airdrop from drones into places like southern China, North Korea, India, the Phillipines and Arkanas.
What did you have in mind?
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I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're greatly overselling this device.
1) Assuming it does hold 20k books on topics from history to advanced biology, is that really preferable to funding better schools? Among the Indian poor, the target market for this device, the school dropout rate is more than 50%. For girls, it's more than 90%. Is giving them a bunch of books really going to improve that?
2) Assuming that the device does contain info on (for example) hygiene and medicine, are people
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1) The full King James Bible (unillustrated, and a formidable text) in epub format is about 1.6MB [gutenberg.org]. 20,000 of that would be 32GB - well within the capacity of a tablet like this, though it might raise the cost another $5. Funding better schools (even if it were possible and it's not - there's no money) will not improve the dropout rate because it arises from different social issues: the need for the students to subsist. But with this? It's a library in your pocket. For much of history a school was a log [chasrmartin.com]
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I'm quite serious. These tablets are themselves from a sci-fi novel - and a not-so-very old one at that - but they are nevertheless realizable in the near term. The pace of progress is picking up quite a bit.
When my grandfather died men had not yet walked on the moon and the very idea was laughable science fiction. My mother was quite the successful medical professional and now I carry more books in my pocket each day (several thousand) than she ever read in her life. We have things now like Khan Acade [khanacademy.org]
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A race to the bottom may result in a lower-quality experience, if the user happens to have a high expectation.
That says, we need to understand that the users of this $35 computer are from India, and although not everyone in India is poor, many of the Indians still don't get to own much to begin with.
One more important thing that will affect the experience thing is the software.
If the apps (including the OS) runs on the $35 computer are bloatwares, they will surely add to the frustration of the users.
So, in
Scale of Economics (Score:2)
What you call, "The Race to the Bottom," is in fact an essential link to making the Scale of Economy as rapidly effective as possible. Were you under some delusion that the original Apple computer was cutting edge from the then modern mini-computer perspective? Did you think the Motorola flip phones of the mid-nineties were the best cellular communications device available? There is a significant advantage, even without government subsidies to make things affordable to the poorer portions of the spectrum
Re:Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
For people with NO alternative experience, even weak devices can change their lives.
Would you rather have NO computer, or a Celeron 500 with 256MB RAM? Those specs don't even merit a dumpster dive nowadays in the US, but don't forget what you can do with one.
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Amusingly, devices like this get figured into the amorphous statistic of "Android marketshare" in countless forum operating system arguments.
Andy Rubin - Dec 20, 2011 - Public ...and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and "activations" means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service.
Cheaper stuff is cheaper (Score:3)
Duh! Cheaper stuff is not as good as expensive stuff (most of the time). I have an old dumb phone, that is not as good as a new powerful smartphone. Is my "experience" lower quality than it would be with a brand new i-phone or something similar? Sure it is. Am I willing to pay my phone company the money they charge for such new phone, plus data plan? Hell no! It's simply not worth to me, and I know better way to spend my money. Another example: when I go backpacking, could I spend few thousand dollar
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To be fair, the OLPC was a crappy 200 dead end, that spurned the development of the $200 broadly available netbook and the $400 entry-level laptop. Smartphones were derided as incompatible portable browsers attached to a uselessly tiny screen, until they took over the world. The "Race to the bottom" is pretty much where most people live, and where revolutions happen.
Maybe a $35 uselessly anachronistic tablet will finally spurn some $50 broadly available tablites. Or single-use interactive eTextbooks. Or
World's cheapest tablet (Score:2, Funny)
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You mean slate and flint? Pen and paper? Or, I'll give you the more advanced, yet clumsy, Etch-A-Sketch.
Pfft. Time to get medieval all up in this thang: blood and skin!
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"I'll give you the more advanced, yet clumsy, Etch-A-Sketch."
Those make great gifts. We gave one to our Lieutenant as a laptop.
(He had a good sense of humor!)
This is great (Score:2, Insightful)
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It isn't a basic human right. Basic human rights are things like food, clothing, shelter and arguably health care. As long as those things are not being provided to a huge portion of the human race, it's a bit soon to talk about computing.
Even when those things are provided for, it's hard to argue that something like computing which isn't a necessity to live is a basic human right.
That being said, it is something of significance, without which one cannot hope to be fully engaged in society, at least not in
Basic human responsibilities (Score:2)
it's hard to argue that something like computing which isn't a necessity to live is a basic human right.
If one of the basic human responsibilities is paying tax, doesn't one have a right to any computing device needed to file a tax return?
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Sure, but you don't need a computer to do that. You can still fill it out long hand on paper and send it in. It's still quite a bit of a stretch to believe that computing is a basic human right.
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In Brazil you can't.
366 MHz? (Score:5, Funny)
Ha. You old people are so funny. You could never do anything real on a 366 MHz processor. I mean, like, the Android I got for christmas has at LEAST 1200 megahertzes. I bet they had at least that when they went to that moon or invented the awesome SR-71.
Who are these indian kids that would even get this. I would be soooo mad if someone got me this for christmas. Such a horrible gift. No one could ever even use it.
Let them have the original iPhone. [wikipedia.org]
Re:366 MHz? (Score:4, Informative)
You make a good point. I always thought it rather a shame that the excellent GPE (for iPaq) never went anywhere - GPE (the gnome-palmtop-environment) ran really well on the 266 MHz CPUs of its day, and contained regular linux + busybox + X + Gtk + some applications. It fitted into 16 MB of flash and 32MB of RAM. Sadly nobody ever created the phone-peripheral to make this into a smartphone, and we ended up evolving backwards - making phones gradually more smart, instead of fitting a voice-modem to a pre-existing portable computer. As a result, Android is 7 years late, and an atrocious resource-hog. Meanwhile, we had a diversion for QTopia etc (on, for example, the Zaurus). Qt was so much slower than Gtk for embedded devices (though it was prettier if one prized beauty over speed), and the resulting systems were unusable.
Part of the problem with Android (and iPhone) is that they run a Java GUI rather than X/Gtk (thereby making them incompatible with all the old, and fast apps); the other problem is that most apps aren't GPL. The consequence of this is that there is no central package manager (with dependency resolution and shared libraries). So every single app has to bundle its own icons, its own copy of the libraries, and run in its own sandbox. This makes them far more bloated. I do like Android, but we could get at least 10x better performance out of it if the environment were better engineered.
You can easily demonstrate this to yourself: take a look at MenuetOS, which fits an OS + GUI + browser + media-player + editor + source-code on a single floppy!
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Excuse me. My palm worked reasonably with 16MHz. Ok that wasnt android, but if you restrict the appication to the things you really need it should be fine.
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My palm usually works in the 1/2 to 2 Hz range, and I have no complaints, even fireworks at times.
Re:366 MHz? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm Indian you know.. Perhaps it does not occur to you, but there are people in this country who earn less in a year than you'd pay for a decent meal at a two star restraunt. There are millions of such people in fact. To say that the government agencies work hard to play this figure down, would be a gross understatement. But even though I live in a fairly prosperous patch of the country, living here since I was born, I have actually met such people.
In a country of over a billion people, with barely 0.4% of the population sucking up 90% of the money that floats around, it is a spectacular vision of neglect and sadness.
About 35% of the population of India lives below the poverty line. FYI, the poverty line translates to $6 US a year!
Sure, for you it would feel like a kick in the stomach to receive a device such as this for christmas, but trust me, kids who get this device here would literally be willing to sell their kidneys for the opportunity to have one of them.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying I love the device, just that there are loads of people who will. And not only will they love and enjoy it, they will actually get it to do stuff the rest of us never even dreamed possible on such a low-spec toy.
So if someone asks me to buy the device for myself, I'd tell them to go eat shit. But I would nevertheless be glad to see it go out into the market for those who would otherwise go completely deviceless. I think there's some honour in that somewhere, but I'm having trouble putting it into words. :) Forgive me.
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We hear you. You make great sense. Please ignore the jerks. The Internet is full of jerks but it has good people too. This stuff is coming and to these folks it will be free. It will hold enough information to help people live successful, healthy, educated lives without imposing any burden on them. They will not require power or wireless, or anything else. And there will be a LOT of them.
They will still have to work but if they will work together all other things are possible.
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> I'm Indian you know.. Perhaps it does not occur to you, but there are people in this country who earn less in a year than you'd pay for a decent meal at a two star restraunt.
Having worked in many parts of India, I understand, and have tried to point that out also. I personally don't understand the philosophy "well if you can't afford an ipad you don't need a tablet" and I'd like to assure you that there are many of us here who think that's an offensive, ugly-firstworlder position to take, comparable t
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That was an excellent and informative post, and well deserving of a +5 moderation, but I think you should know that the person you are responding to was speaking sarcastically. As he pointed out, while this tablet may be weak by modern standards, it's still much stronger than what was used to put men on the Moon or to design and fly the world's first supersonic stealth jets.
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YHBT. LOL. HTH. HAND.
And just as seriously, I would love to have a mess of these tablets. I have all kinds of uses for them.
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Poverty in India (and elsewhere) is truly a horrific problem, one I hope becomes a more widely understood issue in the "privileged" world. However, I am curious as to this assertion:
About 35% of the population of India lives below the poverty line. FYI, the poverty line translates to $6 US a year!
World Bank [worldbank.org] estimates that ~24% of the Indian populace earns less than $1 per day, but $6 per year is orders of magnitude more dire. Now, estimates are estimates, and I am certainly willing to be corrected, but if the situation is so severe that reliable estimates vary by orders of magnitude, I would be interested to know abo
sarcasm (Score:2)
FWIW, the parent post linked his indelicate utterance with another on wikipedia (the famous "... let them eat cake.")
The wikipedia article was interesting, as well, because I didn't know that the evidence points away from Marie Antoinette having said it.
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Yeah, troll, but ... I was working on $40,000 workstations in the late 1970s and early 1980s - 768x1024 or 1280x1024 displays, both monochrome (bit-mapped) and color (pixel-mapped). The fastest one (see Perq [wikipedia.org]) had a 1MHz CPU, processing on a 64-bit memory pipeline. It had a pretty good window manager (with a mouse that worked on a special tablet), a programmable microprogram store, and an OS written in a systems-capable variant of Pascal. (Perq didn't come out with color till later.)
The hard drive was IIR
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Um, not a troll, was sarcasm -- you're in violent agreement with original poster.
But thanks for making your points. I also started career in the late seventies, developed software on massively expensive workstations with resources much less than is currently available in an ipod nano. (I still have an original DEC VT100, and it still works.) These young earbud junkies... [1] appear to be incapable of understanding that valuable work can be done on hardware that is not the latest and greatest trendy up-t
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Yes. It's amazing how we can manage to keep creating ever-larger software that manages to suck up all those cycles - it's a dirty job, but we're up to it! :D
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Let them have the original iPhone.
412 MHz... Too slow to ever be useful.
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Ignoring the blatant trolling of your comment
WHOOSH!
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I could still get on the internet, play music
By "music" do you mean recorded audio or just MIDIs with no lyrics?
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IIRC, the 1st gen TiVos were PPC running at a whopping 50 MHz, about the time Intel was hitting 500 MHz with the Pentium III. The system was designed so the encoder or satellite tuners and video decoder could bus master to and from the IDE interface directly, the main CPU never touched the video stream.
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I don't think it was trolling, it was rather obvious sarcasm. "megahertzes" should have been a clue, also that the SR-71flew five years before Intel released the 4004.
(And didn't they use slide rules on the moon missions?)
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hm I had no issues playing back video on my 25mhz 386
Reduce the price of tablets overall (Score:3)
Yes please. (Score:5, Interesting)
It would also make a hella good universal remote for the lounge.
Problem is now that tablets are spiffy high price gadgets with premium hardware and spiffy graphics that cost the same as a entry level laptop. I'd have one tablet to do all those things and have to carry it with me. Things will change radically when tablets really do become as cheap as they should be. Cheap enough and we'll start covering surfaces with them.
All the interface animations and physical metaphor graphics (brushed metal, wood grain - Apple's microsoft bob era design philosophy), but after a while it's no benefit and a small waste of your time and battery power every time you watch a 500ms transition animation. They just get in the way and in the end I'd rather have more battery life/response/cheaper hardware.
I really cannot wait to get my hands on a useful $99 or less tablet that actually doesn't look good, is rugged and doesn't have fancy graphics.
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A transition animation helps the brain (subconsciously) recognize how one piece of information on the screen relates to other pieces of information on the screen.
it could, but only if it were meaningful. the magic lamp effect in OSX (or compiz with xgl, under which now-dead combination it was actually smooth and usable) is a good example of that. since stuff moves around the OSX dock (or avant window navigator, which I was using when I was using xgl) it's nice to see your window collapse into the icon so you know which one to restore later.
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Apple has studies that it in fact does ... course they are from 1983 when people might have an heart attack if a game show host popped his hands out of his leisure suit a bit too fast ...
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I really cannot wait to get my hands on a useful $99 or less tablet that actually doesn't look good, is rugged and doesn't have fancy graphics.
Assuming it even works in the first place.
Personally, I'm like you, I couldn't care less about the look, the icons, or the form factor either, but at the minimum I'd require a super cheap tablet that registers the touches properly.
I've tried cheap under-powered android-derived tablets before, and I can tell you, there is nothing more frustrating as a user than having to touch a screen three or four times instead of touching it only once because the touchscreen doesn't register touch inputs properly. And I d
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Don't forget you can stick one on the steering wheel.
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Just hope the airbag doesn't inflate, otherwise it's gonna give a new meaning to retina display :)
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Correction: You have a million and one uses for EXPENSIVE tablets, if you could get them cheap.
I've used several cheap tablets. There's good reason they are cheap. Usually, I wouldn't take them if they were giving them away for free...
On a very cheap tablet, expect the touch-screen to be either massively unresponsive, to the point you're gouging your thumb into it pretty hard to get it to respond, or even worse, very responsive, to the point it g
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Dealextreme has a 600MHz tablet for $89 which has Android 2.2 on it IIRC and which is reputed to actually be fairly good. Not great battery life, but what do you want for under a bill? You have to wade through a bunch of craplets to find the one good one in that price range.
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"No, it doesn't. If you don't want it, just go without games."
Not all kids are spoiled.
$60 'commercial' price point? (Score:2)
Odd, i just bought a 5" 'tablet' from China for that price. Seems this has already been done.
It Depends On Your Profit Margin and features (Score:5, Informative)
Currently there are ARM Cortex A8 tablets with 7" LCD's using the $5.00 Allwinner A10 ARM soc on sale for ~120ea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCvef9IYX0o [youtube.com]
http://tabletrepublic.com/forum/cortex-a8-allwinner-a10/ [tabletrepublic.com]
The actual cost to build them is around $60 ea
Too expensive... I prefer.. a rock tablet! (Score:2)
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If they can make the thing dirt and water resistant (almost essential, and ideally even waterproof, in the humid Indian climate), I would say it's a better solution for India than books and paper. Some of the OLPC ideas for making it cheap, robust and usable would be beneficial. Books may cost as much as several days pay for an average poor Indian just for the printing. If a single 'book' can be downloaded 100,000,000 times to simple tablets, it's much cheaper than printing the necessary books to educate