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$99 Moby Tablet As Textbook Alternative
Taco Cowboy writes "Marvell's Moby tablet will be an always-on, high performance multimedia tablet capable of full Flash support and 1080p HD playback and supporting WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio, GPS and both Android and Windows Mobile platforms for maximum flexibility. It could eliminate the need for students to buy and carry bound textbooks and an array of other tools. The tablet is expected to hold a full year's worth of books but weigh less than half of one typical textbook." The tablet is a bit vaporous at this point, but if the final device comes anywhere near these specs and price point, it could be attractive.
How about just letting me load the textbooks onto the laptop I already carry around?
The CrunchPad was supposed to be a dead-simple, cheap $200 tablet. Closer to production, it looks like it'll cost more like $500. A $99 device would be nice, but I'll believe it when I see it. A decent screen + NAND memory + battery alone will add to the cost.
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...all this great looking (and supposedly wonderfully performing) ARM powered vaporware products that either never shows up outside China or retail for ridiculously high prices and so locked in with WinCE nobody wants it?
Either put up or shut up already! Personally I'd rather they put up than shut up, but either way enough already!
--bornagainpenguin
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So, is DC coming out with one as well? A Dark Knight themed tablet would be cool.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Launch package deal comes bundled with Duke Nukem Forever and Optimus Maximus keyboard support.
Another kdawson special. The product does not exist. It cannot be purchased. If every claim about what somebody INTENDS to do is news...
I don't mind lugging them around. What I mind is paying out ridiculous amounts for a rehash of last year's now worthless book. They sell ebook versions of textbooks; I don't see how this will hamper that (besides eliminating resale markets). What we need is some serious, high quality, free, open source type textbooks. I wouldn't mind paying to have them stamped on dead tree, I like dead tree, it's the BS mark-up that's the problem. This is cool and all, but it would mean a lot more if they could get something good and free/reasonably priced to put in it.
Seriously, you thought the RIAA and MPAA were bad? Hoo boy, you're in for a surprise when you meet the textbook publishers. They aren't even human, they're like... Mind Flayers, or something. Pure evil, and smarter than you think.
Textbook pubs will never permit mass electronic distribution unless they have mandatory DRM backed by scary laws that the state aggressively enforces. When Congress passes laws authorizing copyright holders and their agents/officials to summarily arrest and imprison suspected copyright violators, without trial or notice, THEN the textbook publishers will decide that they feel confident moving into electronic distribution.
But one of these days, somebody will start selling cheap, easy-to-make/use automated book scanners (with page turning capabilities). Or maybe they'll put up an Instructable. That'll be the harpoon in the side, for the textbook industry.
I would rather use E-Paper, tables are good and all but they are hard on the eyes after a while. http://novelwhore.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/e-paper.jpg
Poor lighting causes eye strain. The reason why people don't get eye strain from e-paper as much is because is "requires" ambient light in order for you to see the screen. Don't use the blacklit display as a replacement for sufficient lighting and your eyes will be fine.
Stop buying into the hype. Do people work in offices on e-paper displays all day? No. Eye strain does not occur if you take frequent breaks and work in a well lit environment.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Me too! I had been keeping an eye out for ARM based "smartbooks" etc. for several months. Lots of reference designs, lots of demos at CES. No one ever brought anything decent to retail stores. I heard HP was releasing something in Spain. Lenovo is supposed to be releasing something in the US later this year.
I wanted something around a $200 price with decent battery life, capable of running Linux. I wanted ARM, too, because I didn't want to buy a machine that came with Windows only to wipe it. After months of waiting, I gave up.
A few weeks ago I purchased a used Acer Aspire One, along with a high capacity battery. Total price, including shipping and taxes for all items, was less than $200. The machine had originally come with Windows, but was sold without any OS installed. I put Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it, and I'm quite happy with it.
I'm now out of the market for one of these many rumored ARM-based devices... no one has any decent offerings (and no, the Touchbook is not what I would consider a decent, consumer-oriented offering, and they're not even in stock AFAICT), so I gave up. Also, $99 for this Moby Tablet? Yeah, right. Maybe the bill of materials is $99, but I doubt even that. This thing stinks badly of being vaporware.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Huh? "Carry" is one thing, "buy" is another. It's true that free textbooks exist (see my sig), but they are not yet all that popular in K-12 or colleges. California has a Free Digital Textbook Initiative for high schools, but it has not yet reshaped the landscape; the traditional commercial publishers are essentially sitting it out.
So I don't see why a cheap tablet would eliminate the need for students to buy textbooks. Publishers are already offering DRM'd electronic textbooks, at about the same price as print textbooks. K-12 schools that are using non-free books will still need to buy books for their kids. College students will still need to buy books.
Actually, the traditional publishers love DRM'd e-books, because it's a way for them to kill off the used book market. They can use the DRM to prevent you from selling your copy if you don't want it when you're done with the class.
The books I use in my physics courses at a community college are all free online as DRM-free PDFs. Even so, the vast majority of my students end up buying a printed copy. (I don't receive any royalty from the printed books. They're priced pretty cheap, about the same as photocopying.) Maybe some of them are not going digital because they can't afford a laptop, but I suspect that in most cases, they actually perceive a printed book as more convenient than an electronic one. Reading a book off the screen of a laptop is a pain in the ass. It's much nicer and easier to be able to see two full pages at once, in a large format, and to be able to riffle through pages.
Find free books.
I suppose this could used for textbooks?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16858723010&Tpk=ectaco%20jetbook%20lite
The main problem is that you either have to provide students with power outlets, or the batteries have to be able to perform in the real world for around 8-12 hours.
I would have loved to have had such an option when I was in Uni. You had two choices. Either carry the textbook as you were told in which case you'd better have a good hiking backpack and like being a social outcast, or don't carry them and do your homework/reading at home. Most students chose the later.
I did my Masters online and never had to carry a book. It was a much better experience in that respect.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
SheevaPlug is $99 with no screen or battery. A tablet at that price would be really something.
Little more for textbooks. Figures take up space. The programming texts I have in PDF form usually weigh in close to 10 MB. A decent anatomy and physiology text is closer to 100 MB.
Multiply by eight to twelve courses a year and you're still not talking about much space by today's standards, but you're into not-a-ridiculous-estimate territory, particularly for a $99 device.
Nice buzzword usage, but see, I actually WORK at a University Press, and we make textbooks. And we're doing pdfs for the majority of our ebooks.
The *real* reason that textbook publishers don't make more ebooks is much less sinister:
There's no universal standard for ebooks. It costs money to get something converted to a format and checked for errors, and you don't want to fragment your efforts too much, so out of the several dozen implementations of ebook formats, you pick one or two, then you pick which version of THAT you want to support, and you try and learn about them. And since it takes two years or more just to make a textbook, by the time you've got a format learned sufficiently to get it in to your workflow, you've still got a two year lag before books start showing up in that format.
But oh hey! In the meantime, the standard shifted. So you're back to trying to learn the standard and get that merged in to your workflow. You think the RIAA and MPAA handled the change in the technology of their field badly? Books have been printed basically the same for centuries, not decades. Since the printing press, there's not been many advances that effect publishing. The offset printing press, and use of computers to do layout and editing. No, seriously, that's about it. Books are long enough that few people wanted to have to sit and stare at a screen for hours on end, so they never had to worry about digital distribution until laptops became common, and even then, people still didn't want to read things hundreds of pages long on a screen. It's only been in about the last 10 years or so that it's even been mentioned, and it wasn't anything close to a viable idea until the kindle came out in 2007. And remember what I said about textbooks taking at least 2 years to get through the publishing process?
No, you'll start seeing textbooks for e-readers when the formats are more stable. Until then, you'll get most publishers playing it safe and not wasting their cash on converting.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I have a PhD and have always read far more on a CRT or backlit LCD than I have on paper, mostly code and papers versus textbooks.
If you adjust a backlit screen properly and use it in appropriate lighting conditions it's the same as a reflective screen. Reflected photons aren't magic.
Have you looked at the ebook category on the Pirate Bay recently? It's not "it could be done very quickly," it IS done.
It's tough to find THE textbook you need because there are so many. It's not hard at all to find A textbook on a given subject.
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It's not awesome at all that some electronic widget can do all those things. What's awesome must be the textbook it's replacing! When I was in school I never had a textbook that did WiFi, 1080 HD, Flash, GPS, etc, etc, etc. Mine were all just paper with non-moving print on the pages.
They need to reach ARM Cortex A9 or good A8 with full hardware acceleration of Google Android for Laptops or Google Chrome OS software and Flash 10 support for full speed web browsing. Once they have that, which is really imminent, they will be selling huge amounts all over the market.
It's as good as e-ink for reading. Check my video: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/08/charbax-tests-pixel-qi-at-ces-2010/ I tested it only for a few minutes though, I didn't actually read much on it, just had time to check it out outdoors and indoors at Computex 2009 and at CES 2010 as I was filming those Pixel Qi videos. It's very very readable and the whole 10" screen currently uses less than 500 milliwatts which means potentially reaching 50 hours battery runtime using an ARM processor to turn e-book pages on a 3-cell netbook-sized battery.
Check the link, there is a picture of a working prototype at 10" and even a video of a working prototype with a 4.3" screen.
You make a decent point. The Nvidia Tegra processor, QualCom Snapdragon, and TI something-or-other, are all fine ARM processors for multi-touch slates, yet no respectable manufacturer (I'm not including Apple as "respectable"), has even announced a device based on this.
My brother-in-law works at Dell, and while he may take issue with how I paraphrase him, what I heard was "Dell doesn't innovate. Instead, we wait for others to prove the market first, and then crush them with our manufacturing capabilities." The big players, like Dell and HP, are waiting for the equivalent of the Asus EEE PC in the ARM based tablet/slate space. Once an off-brand has dominated the market, they'll follow like lemmings. In the meantime, early adopters will need to buy products like "Notion Ink Atom" from some random group of entrepreneurial Indians, or this Marvell thingy. Honestly, I think the big players look to Apple for innovation. MacBook Air? How about a nice Dell netbook for 1/4 the price? iPad? How about a Dell slate for $150? At least we have that great A-hole Steve Jobs to help our corporations find their way...
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The Pixel Qi screen is designed to cost about the same as a regular LCD screen, especially once mass produced by the millions. And Pixel Qi is confirming that their technology is not being mass produced by LCD manufacturers without them having had to change anything in the LCD factories, thus as soon as the orders for millions of these screens comes in, I think you could find a 10" Pixel Qi with a Bill of Material below $60 including the capacitive touch screen.
Check out Pixel Qi on youtube. Better sunlight readability than e-ink, cheaper, larger displays, and with the backlight on, you can watch video in color. With backlight off (e-ink mode), you battery can last days, not hours. Still, not weeks like some e-ink products, but getting there. So, I 100% agree with you. I don't want an iPad. I want something like the Notion Ink Adam.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
No my eyes can't tell the difference between a reflected and emitted photon. They can however tell the difference between a static image and one that's refreshing 60 to 75 time per second.
Eyes are funny and very personal things. At 38 I don't wear glasses, I have an annual eye checkup and I don't need them but I do have some particular quirks with my vision. For instance the refresh rates of an LCD flat panel gives me headaches after sufficient time and I can't read in a car without getting motion sick. On the upside my night vision is so superior that few believe it. Not only can I see in lower light conditions but my eyes can go from strong light to see in the dark in about 90 seconds flat. Most people take upwards of 5 minutes for this transition and some people take 20. My depth perception is also better than average, however I have real issues with strong sunlight. I pretty much have to wear quality sunglasses when I go outside and this seems to be getting worse as I get older.
Your eyes are likely at better at some other things, maybe you've got less sensitivity to refresh rate for instance. Perhaps you can focus to a finer detail than I can or maybe you have more "zoom" than I do. Who knows?
What I do know is that to casually dismiss how someone else's body works is incorrect. For me an e-paper display is much better for long reading sessions than any monitor I have ever come across, no matter how much I fiddle with it's settings.
You should have watched more Inspector Gadget. That Penny chick had the best textbook.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!