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Or he just needed the lowest-priced Android tablet

Are you kidding?

You could buy four AllWinner tablets for the price of one Nexus 7. The SoCs are selling for less than $10 in volume.

Free shipping,boxchip,ALLWinner A13, 7.0" Android 4.0;512MB/4GB, 5 points touch capacitiive touch.Tablet PC Price: US $42.00 - 53.50 / piece

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/free-shipping-boxchip-ALLWinner-A13-7-0-Android-4-0-512MB-4GB-5-points-touch-capacitiive/648623535.html

http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllWinner_A1X

Meanwhile the Chinese have had them for less than $2000 for several years now.

Just found one on
Aliexpress

Has to be the hottest item on AliExpress - the Ainol Fire Flame Burning Tablet.

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/578598639-DaPeng-Android-4-0-New-Smart-Phone-5-0-WVGA-Capacitance-Screen-A75-MTK6575-GPS-WIFI-wholesalers.html

Or Android phones, one at a time.

I've bought stuff through them and their retail site: aliexpress
It's pretty safe. You can search for $0 shipping options if you like.

They run the escrow between you and the actually seller. Your money get 'verified' before the order goes in.

Then the seller ships to you. Once you get the order (and it usually comes way faster than DX) you have to log on to Alibaba and indicate that you got the stuff, so they can release the money. Feedback is important, too.

One seller tried to push me off Alibaba and get me to buy direct, but I didn't want to lose the escrow protection.

I've only had one defective product problem, but the seller was very careful to make good.

Or Aliexpress to be exact... and pretty much clicked the first thing that made me say WTF. Okay that's a lie, it was one of the three things on the first screen that made me go WTF. Here you go:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Emperorship-necomimi-cat-ears-cat/622965849.html

To quote the link that brought me to that page: "Don't bother with traditional methods of finding a partner. Pop a pair of Brain Wave Cat Ears on the head of the one you love, and if they twitch... they like you!"

I'm pretty sure they'd twitch all right... and I'm not talking about the ears. Twitch and run away.

I have so much desire to order from Alibaba, but I can't quite figure out how to verify that I won't be screwed. It seems almost guaranteed.

Try aliexpress.com first.
I used them about 3-5 times this year, haven't been screwed in any of the occasions. (seems the funds are held in escrow until you get the goods and confirm or until you don't do anything for about 2 months - they assume in 2 months either you got the goods or you'll be triggering an incident with them).

Not exactly. Alibaba also sells direct to consumers: http://www.aliexpress.com/

I recently figured this out. There is another site Ali Express which caters to individual buyers. All prices are listed along with delivery costs. It seems to have a nice filter / search function. ,

Also if you are concerned about the equipment arriving and not working, there is buyer protection, where they will hold your money until you are satisfied withe purchase. I didn't have to use this so it may be difficult to get the refund, all I can say is I was satisfied with the service I got and I would use it again.

(Note; I am not affiliated in any way with Alibaba or Aliexpress)

Amazon is not alone.

Both eBay and AliExpress are competing in this arena, and if I had my guess, AliExpress is going to be a formidable competitor because of the international nature of their operations.

Remember when "internet search" meant "Yahoo"?

Things can change damn fast these days, rivers of revenue change courses, and what was once a river becomes a dry bed of sand.

Just one tax law or regulation changes, then a business model based on the existing set of conditions becomes nonviable. Just as copyright law put napster out of business, tax law could easily put a damper on interstate trade - not revectoring the trade through a local route, but stopping the trade completely. It seems that 99% of the stuff I buy, I really do not need, but at a good price, I'll go for it Bump the price or aggravation to purchase up, and I'll just say "to hell with it", and the purchase and resulting economic activity just doesn't happen.

Sticker Lenses, only on a nano level. Am I missing something?

Following is a link to a major Chinese internet shopping mall run very similar to Amazon in America. I have been buying all sorts of electronic goodies here. Caveat: there is usually NO documentation shipped with the product. Be able to determine from the vendors web page if this is the item you want before you buy. Do not expect any technical support. Once in a while I do get a disappointment, so buy a sample or two first.

Import it yourself!

If you make lots of prototypes, as I do, you will find all sorts of subassemblies of other stuff here you can adapt to what you want. At a fraction of industrial catalog price. Arduino lovers take note.

Fer cryin' out loud, don't pay a big markup to someone else to visit this site for you.

No, but if they make a nice dramatic price drop, it might do the trick.

This is what kind of tablet $41 buys you right now in China:

7" 1.2GHz Allwinner A13 Q88 tablet, 5 point capacitive Screen, Android 4.0, 512MB RAM, 4GB Storage, Webcam, Wifi

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/611000195-7-Allwinner-A13-Q88-tablet-pc-5-point-capacitive-Screen-android-4-0-Multi-Touch-1-wholesalers.html

How much margin do you think there'd be for Windows OS on hardware like that?

Yep, we've been loading Novo 7 Tornados with manuals, training PDFs, OHS links, etc and handing them out to trainees and customers.

At $75 each, they're cheaper than printed manuals and far more likely to be carried and used. The have 1GHz processors, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage, and Android 4.03...

I'm not going to pay more than $14/set

I have no relationship with any of these. I'm specifically pointing this one out because many others in this form factor supposedly are lacking ESD protection on the HDVI port. As such, this one specifcally addresses that complaint.

You can also buy a variety of devices from dealextreme. Such as mele a1000 and the mele a2000. Here's a hint, they have EXACTLY the same hardware on the inside. They just have a different case and the internal flash has been partitioned differently (2GB vs 4GB). The DX buys are not the cheapest to be found either. You can also buy from AliExpress. There also also a variety of other makes, models, and form factors. I've even seen bare boards. You just need to spend some time reading and googling.

As you can see, there isno point in waiting around for an rPi anymore.

Good luck.

Yeah, shame nobody's thought of it before.

"Android keyboard case" 1,735 Results http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=android+leather+keyboard&catId=0&manual=y

None of those look remotely like the Surface keyboard in terms of how extremely little bulk it add to the tablet, or are as easy to snap on and off. This matters for a tablet. I also liked how the Surface touch keyboard is pressure sensitive, so you can rest your fingers on it (to touch type) without getting letters registered before you actually press to type.

"Android keyboard case" 1,735 Results http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=android+leather+keyboard&catId=0&manual=y

Windows phones probably are outselling iPhones in China because the iPhone still has limited carrier selectivity.

There might be other reasons.

Original samsung i900 8GB/16GB cell phone unlocked Windows 3G 5MP
Price: US $81.00 - 101.00 / piece

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/566727336-original-samsung-i900-8GB-16GB-cell-phone-unlocked-windows-3G-5MP-wholesalers.html.

In lots of 100 or more, you can get them for less than $75. Smaller resellers often package them with a reasonable version of Android pre-installed. I'm guessing they all count as a Windows phone sales.

Why not go to a FriendlyARM Mini2440? For about $150 you can pick it up from http://www.aliexpress.com/ and you have a full fledged Linux board with plenty of i/o and touch screen...
Happy hacking! Jasper

Or are you just that MS shill?

Hard to say who's a shill and who's just trolling these days. Whatever this one's motivation, between shills and trolls, they've just about managed to kill Slashdot as a worthwhile site to discuss interesting topics.

In this instance, the shills probably had good motivation to prevent open discussion. Datawind may have succeeded in making a cheap tablet, but they were by no means the only one. Indian (and other buyers) are spoilt for choice at the bottom of the market, with dozens of vendors selling tablets at or below the $45 mark http://www.aliexpress.com/category/100005062/tablet-pcs.html?pvId=48-350286%2C200000563-200002770&SortType=price_asc&SortType=y.

I've obtained a few of these, and they're actually quite usable. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see something similar in blister-packs on supermarket shelves soon.

Handheld computing is VERY rapidly becoming a commodity, with competition driving prices down and features up. Companies who've bet heavily on it remaining a premium/luxury market must hate that.

Actually here's a better model and $2 cheaper http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/439643437-Free-shipping-NEW-7-Inch-Android-2-3-256M-4GB-WiFi-Tablet-Pc-wholesalers.html

Everyone touts it as the second coming, some great breakthrough etc. Well here's one for $55. $10 more? Yes. But with free worldwide shipping included.
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/454240700-7-Inch-Android-2-2-Tablet-PC-support-WIFI-3G-Android-MID-with-retail-package-8121-wholesalers.html
+ thousands of other models.
People thinking a tablet is called an iPad and costs $500 or whatever and you can get nothing cheaper, should get a reality (or an Aliexpress) check.

Some cheap ones from China

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/520078286-MQ-3-Alcohol-Ethanol-Sensor-Module-Breathalyser-Gas-Checker-Breath-Detector-090346-wholesalers.html

If you are thinking of driving home, it would be a helluva lot cheaper if this device told you about it before the Highway Patrol does.

Yes, you can get them for around $100 in volume.

Latest Ainol Novo 7 Aurora android 4.0 tablet pc 7" IPS Capacitive screen Camera 1GB DDR3 8GB HDMI

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/525833992-Latest-Ainol-novo-7-Aurora-android-4-0-tablet-pc-7-IPS-Capacitive-screen-Camera-1GB-wholesalers.html

He said, "Brand that most people have heard of," not, "Something made from leftover stuff scraped up off the factory floor from some company that nobody but them has heard of."

Latest Ainol Novo 7 Aurora android 4.0 tablet pc 7" IPS Capacitive screen Camera 1GB DDR3 8GB HDMI
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/525833992-Latest-Ainol-novo-7-Aurora-android-4-0-tablet-pc-7-IPS-Capacitive-screen-Camera-1GB-wholesalers.html

Amazon

Alibaba

As you can see, these things are a real goldmine on the retailer's slotwall peg.

I have had pressure-sensitive floor pads for years. You place them under the carpet. Inside them are strips of spring steel which contact each other under pressure.

They are very 60's , commonly used by shopkeepers to alert them when a customer entered. I got a few to alert me when someone was messing around my house. This was many years ago. The devices have long been replaced with other technologies.

So, would this be prior art?

( And I want to replace the whole shebang again... this time with HB100 modules. ).

will target the emerging markets such as China and Brazil [...] priced below US$299

Ah, the irony! Selling cucumbers to the gardener, ice to Eskimos and coal to Newcastle.

I bought last week one Android tablet for less than $200, postage (by UPS express) included. From mainland China.
I'm pretty sure Brazil (being a good chum with China in BRICS and dropping USD as the trade currency ) would be able to buy at much cheaper prices.

Try aliexpress - get a brand new android 4 with 1 GB RAM/8GB SD for $145(+H&S). If you don't like droid, boot a linux distro - no need to root it first.

Try aliexpress - get a brand new android 4 with 1 GB RAM/8GB SD for $145(+H&S). If you don't like droid, boot a linux distro - no need to root it first.

Amazon / B&N own the the low end and subsidize their products by media sales, there is no way to compete at that space.

Yes there is.

"Ainol Novo 7 Paladin Android 4.0 ICS XBurst 1 gHz 8GB wifi tablet PC 5 pieces / lot , US$40.00 / piece"
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/539544868-Ainol-Novo-7-Paladin-Android-4-0-ICS-XBurst-1-gHz-8GB-wifi-tablet-PC-wholesalers.html

These things will be showing up in blister packs on supermarket shelves soon.

If you can't get there, try http://www.aliexpress.com/. They have a fair bit of gear, and the extra markup's probably worh it for the convenience.

This has 4 times the memory, twice the clock speed and twice the cores of the Pi, of course it isn't going to be less then twice the price. Everything else being equal you might expect nearly 4 times the price (i.e. ~$130)

So, $130 for a bare board with CPU and RAM?
Yeah that would sound great, except when anyone can build a whole PC for $191, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392163,00.asp
With 2x the RAM and a CPU that rips the ARM on PandaBoard into a thousand of tiny teddy bears in terms of performance.
And a frigging 500 GB HDD (ok, pre-HDD-crisis).

You could say, "yeah but it's not ARM and low-power etc". Okay. There are now Chinese tablets with comparable specs, http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/509457480-CPAM-Free-shipping-10-1-superpad-3-android-2-3-tablet-pc-flytouch-3-GPS-512MB-wholesalers.html
that cost $125 shipped. Including stuff like 10" touch screen, camera, internal flash, battery, casing, etc, etc. There's no way a bare board should cost $130. It's just vendors up until now felt just fine with hiking up the price as much as they desire, because those who need it (for development etc) would buy it anyway, or even buy on their company's funds. But hopefully the Raspberry Pi will beat some sense into competitors in this area, and this will move an ARM PC from the ranks of a too-expensive-to-be-practical dream, to reality.

What would be some useful keywords to use, to search, say, eBay for a device such as that?

The answer to that is a bit complicated because it's not an advertised capability of any HDMI switch/repeater but an inevitable consequence of forcing the cost of DRM onto manufacturers. If an HDMI device manufacturer includes HDCP then their product is less interoperable, slower, and less reliable than that of a manufacturer who doesn't, leading to customer dissatisfaction and lost sales. The economically rational thing for a manufacturer to do then is to not include HDCP (or more generally to pretend to do DRM but to not actually do so in practice). This doesn't work too well if you're a US or European manufacturer within lawyer range, but if you're a fly-by-night manufacturer in Shenzhen who won't be around (at least under the same name/shell company) in a week then it's perfectly OK to do this. So the one I have is a standard off-the-shelf HDMI switch made with standard parts used in endless numbers of devices globally that simply doesn't bother turning on HDCP in the output (I've looked at the data coming over the internal control bus, it clears the HDCP-out bits on the HDMI switch chips).

So unfortunately there's no easy way to specifically locate something that does this. In my case the search criteria were "the cheapest HDMI switch from the closest place that's open at 5pm on a Sunday", and the HDCP stripping was a pleasant extra. One starting point would be Alibaba, but be warned that that's drinking from a firehose (a search for 'HDMI' gives 75,000 hits).

.

What would be some useful keywords to use, to search, say, eBay for a device such as that?

The answer to that is a bit complicated because it's not an advertised capability of any HDMI switch/repeater but an inevitable consequence of forcing the cost of DRM onto manufacturers. If an HDMI device manufacturer includes HDCP then their product is less interoperable, slower, and less reliable than that of a manufacturer who doesn't, leading to customer dissatisfaction and lost sales. The economically rational thing for a manufacturer to do then is to not include HDCP (or more generally to pretend to do DRM but to not actually do so in practice). This doesn't work too well if you're a US or European manufacturer within lawyer range, but if you're a fly-by-night manufacturer in Shenzhen who won't be around (at least under the same name/shell company) in a week then it's perfectly OK to do this. So the one I have is a standard off-the-shelf HDMI switch made with standard parts used in endless numbers of devices globally that simply doesn't bother turning on HDCP in the output (I've looked at the data coming over the internal control bus, it clears the HDCP-out bits on the HDMI switch chips).

So unfortunately there's no easy way to specifically locate something that does this. In my case the search criteria were "the cheapest HDMI switch from the closest place that's open at 5pm on a Sunday", and the HDCP stripping was a pleasant extra. One starting point would be Alibaba, but be warned that that's drinking from a firehose (a search for 'HDMI' gives 75,000 hits).

.

Sure, PS3-like graphics... except the PS3 is doing it at 1280x720 or 1920x1080. This will be pushing probably 20-40%% of the pixels

Except, it won't. It'll end up in devices like this one (which has its predecessor, the Mali-400, and runs at 1280x768).

Look around on aliexpress dot com under the Tablet PC section. Quite a few tablets for sale with that screen size that have some version of Android. Currently, there's only one seller offering a 9.7 inch tablet with a Qualcomm chipset. It's about $400. http://www.aliexpress.com/category/100005062/tablet-pc.html?pvId=48-200002859

Text output from the brain images of thinking, this is a problem of biological research, look at our ideas you may have different gains, which is a strong manufacturing company http://www.aliexpress.com/fm snow boots -store/316403, unique ideas, innovative design, for the sake of customers, so you're not cold this winter, we work together to create better and better, you get the letter of the product, comfortable to tell you friends uncomfortable you tell us!

Yes but that is after a $85 discount. The normal list price is $499. A quick look at it seem to be similar to the $499 iPad 2 in terms of specs. I suspect that it didn't sell well so it had to be discounted.

I suspect you're reading too much into retail versus actual price. If you look, that's their every day normal pricing. Much like the advertised retail price on cars and what they normally sell them at. You can google and find a number of other China based dealers selling this for even lower. http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=Venus+Pad+Honeycomb+&catId=0 gets vendors selling at $375.

If anything this proves my point, which is that other manufacturers are capable of making a profit selling comparable hardware for $100 cheaper. Apple would have to be doing something very wrong to not be making $50-100 profit on the iPod2 hardware, considering they have the benefit of larger sales and better buying power..

Cell phones are nice, but they can be expensive. And if you are required to keep one for work, then having 2 in your pocket is annoying. Ooma is a way to have your OWN phone number forever for minimal money.

If the cell phone in question is Android - and you can get a cheap Chinese one for less than $150 - then Google Voice will give you the same integrated experience (you can tell the phone to use it for all calls), and you'll also have your own phone number that you can keep.

True, and you can also run something like CSipSimple and use pretty much any SIP provider. I use mine through pbxes.org and it works just fine (I configured it to use Google Voice for my outgoing trunk line.)

Cell phones are nice, but they can be expensive. And if you are required to keep one for work, then having 2 in your pocket is annoying. Ooma is a way to have your OWN phone number forever for minimal money.

If the cell phone in question is Android - and you can get a cheap Chinese one for less than $150 - then Google Voice will give you the same integrated experience (you can tell the phone to use it for all calls), and you'll also have your own phone number that you can keep.

Unlikely if a no-name Chinese manufacturer sells direct for $200 a pop with similar hardware: W1060G

Compare to this which is at $85 in volume without shipping, I'm not sure how it can get the cost down to $10. Some very cheap ARM with integrated flash/ram still cost $10.

Hey look, now there's tablets even better than that for under $100!

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/293443154-cheapest-7inch-MID-with-touch-screen-wholesalers.html

Hmm... chinese crap. :P

I'm not sure that tablet is useful for anything, considering the OS.

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/279205814-Anti-radiation-knitted-men-s-underwear-wholesalers.html