India's $35 Tablet Computer

NotBornYesterday was one of many readers sending in news that the Indian government has announced it is helping to develop a $35 tablet computer running Linux. "India has unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touchscreen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011. The government plans to subsidize the tablets so the cost to students could be $20; and eventually, they hope the cost will fall to $10 per unit. India's human resource development minister, Kapil Sibal, says, 'The motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything.' Using a memory card instead of a hard drive, and running a Linux OS, the designers have managed to keep the price low, and are now looking for manufacturing partners. The tablet can be used for functions like word processing, Web browsing, and video conferencing. It has a solar power option too, which is important in India's less developed areas, though that add-on costs extra."

Comments

Re:Waste of money.

[drinkypoo]

If this thing truly costs $35 it's likely not much better than a calculator. Anything more than that and it didn't actually cost $35. Either someone's eating the cost or the government is subsidizing it.

In the early nineties I had a Sun 4/260 (I upgraded from 3/260) for the nerd cachet of it, and just to learn SunOS. It had 24MB of RAM and the CPU ran at 16.67 MHz. It had an 8 bit dumb framebuffer, and ran SunOS 4.1.3u1 IIRC. On my 512MB SCSI disk I managed to get the full OS, GNU userland and toolchain, xv image viewer, Netscape, and so on. Probable specs for this hardware involve a 300MHz ARM, probably also with a dumb frame buffer, with 64MB RAM and at least 512MB of flash storage. Further, it will probably have 802.11b or possibly even G (but why?) WiFi and USB 2 OTG, and a flash memory slot of some kind, I would guess MicroSD push-pull (no spring clip mechanism.) And you have the gall to suggest that this is too little machine to do actual work? All it really has to do is stream low-quality video and audio, and do email and IM. Well, and websurf, but if the education sites are designed to be lightweight then this device will be able to fulfill its design function.