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India Launches $35 Tablet
Many readers have submitted stories about a new $35 tablet computer released today in India. The Aakash (meaning sky) has been handed out to 500 students for an initial trial run, if successful a $60 commercial version will hit the shelves later this year. The Aakash computer runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), has a 7-inch touch screen, 256MB of RAM, 32GB expandable memory slot, two USB ports, and weighs in at only 350 grams.
"$60 commercial version" meaning it will probably have better hardware. Government giveaways are always cheaper than what the public can buy in both cost and quality.
So, will they outsource their tech support to America?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Hi,
I would like to provide a background for this. The tablets are an endevaour by the Indian Government to reach out to the farmers as a means of communication to advise them about crops and similar kind of work. It is NOT meant to compete on the market with other tablets for normal functionality. I guess, the most important function would be video streaming to show tutorial videos on how to handle crop and inject them with pesticides and such and may be stream other lectuers. To get a background on what kind of exercise is this and wonders its necessity, you might like to visit NPTEL where free lectures are made available by IIT faculty on various college courses (both undergraduate and postgraduate). Due to the population, it is very difficult to reach students and farmers individually so this is the type of "distance education".
For example, in this age also audio lectures are transmitted over radio for anyone to listen by the Indira Gandhi Open University for people who want to study on their own but cannot attend a college as there is probably none in the region they can try to reach.
As it may or may not be common knowledge, software patents per se, are not valid in India. You can patent your code, not your idea (which is pretty pointless). There are certain workarounds the legal system as usual is the case. But ideas and software algos are not patentable per se. So patent encumbered thing might not be a really big issue here. I don't know about resistive or capacitive touch screens though.
How successful it is we all are sceptical (due to corruption and all the issues). But this is the main idea behind it. If it succeeds we would be very happy.
Are you saying that 2012 will be "the year of Linux on the desktop", that I keep hearing so much about.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Its definitely year of linux on the phone and router, and it could be year of linux on the tablet. On the desktop? not so much.
Chinese factories turn out stuff like this all the time. I have traveled to the South Pacific and you can get a basic smart phone for $20--made in china. They won't sell in the western world for that because they can sell the same piece of junk for $120, or "bundle" it for $20 with a term contract. In most countires in Africa where average household expenditure is less than $300, cell phones are prolific--this certainly is not because people are spending a years worth of wages to buy a phone. Companies will charge what the market will bear.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
What's more retarded than either, is an idiotic slashdotter sitting in his mom's basement, gorging on big mac and diet coke, typing stuff which he doesn't know shit about.
Use some brains - the reason this is being produced is not to "desperately imitate what happened decades ago". It is to provide millions of poor students an opportunity to buy their own tablet/computing device.
Or, nobody will use it because it's junk. Have you ever noticed how everybody in the world is getting cell phones that are cheap--practically disposable, even--and yet perfectly functional? Can you tell me how many of these phones were the product of some kind of design-a-phone-for-poor-people initiatives?
I'll hazard a guess that the answer is zero.
What happened with cell phones was that the price and quality of commodity parts finally hit a sweet spot where everybody could afford a phone that they actually wanted.
Nobody tried (succesfully, anyways) to cobble together the cheapest junk possible into a barely useable "poor folks' phone." The idea of using a massive government purchase to drive down the commodity price sounds good in theory, but didn't work for the OLPC, and won't work for yet another Indian tablet-for-the-masses, because nobody wants the product that they're trying to make.
What will bring tablet computing to the masses--assuming the masses find any value in them--are the true commodity tablets that are starting to emerge from China, that are taking advantage of the price declines from the mass production of Kindles and iPads.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
They don't sell in the west because those phones are poorly designed pieces of crap that don't work properly, have terribly battery life, and break after a couple of months of gentle use.
I read the internet for the articles.
Look at the state of Medicare and Social Security, though. They are operating at a horrible loss and probably won't even exist in their current form in the next 20 years. People constantly tout Medicare and Social Security as the model for how things should be done, but they are only surviving due to the influx of money from a generation that will likely never gain any benefit from them.
I would pay $35 for an alarm clock with an adjustable face, on which I can check my email, and that I can use to write myself quick notes or check a web page. I'd probably buy five of them to put all over the house.
The OLPC cost $400 because you were buying two devices. the second device was your donation through the Give One Get One program. It was the only way you could buy them.
The reason the devices cost $200 each was because the OLPC suffered a bit of feature creep and bad pricing projections on components.
The idea was that volume sales would bring pricing down more closely to the $100 level. I will mention that both Microsoft and Intel tried their best to derail the project*
[*] - http://news.cnet.com/Negroponte-Windows-key-to-OLPC-philosophy/2100-1016_3-6215837.html
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Occupy Wall Street Movement wants Americans to make $20/hour (whether they work or not), so providing tech support for a $35 device at over $20/hour would be a neat trick.
You can't handle the truth.
Here's the specs:
--7-inch resistive touch screen = stylus, not fingers
--Android 2.2 "Froyo"
--800-x-480-pixel resolution
--366mhz cpu
--256mb ram
--2gb internal storage
--microSD
--two USB ports
--3.5mm headphone jack
--2100mAh battery that can last up to 3 hours
--does NOT have access to Android Market
Here's a dozen detailed photos of the device
It's not impressive by any means but then again it's not suppose to impress those of us with an iPhone or latest Droid in our pocket, it's designed for the 1+ billion Indians who have never even been on the internet and for first time internet usage I think it'll be fine at that.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I've used the "1l of water = 1kg" trick to weight a turkey using a 4-pack of bottled water, a broom, a tape-measure, and a chair-back as a pivot. When we found the scales, the value was only about 100g out.
that sounds exactly like the phones they sell here.
Yes, and communism would have worked if only it had been run by angels.
It's a similar spec to my Nokia 770 (a bit better, but close), which I got in 2005. The RRP was $359.99. Moore's Law says the price of transistors ought to halve every 18 months, so if the other components follow a similar curve I'd expect to be able to get it for a tenth of the original price five years later. It's now a bit over six years later, but presumably some of the parts were already about as cheap as they can be without a major breakthrough in mass production techniques. Actually, the most impressive thing is how bad the battery life is. It comes with a third more battery capacity than the 770 yet the battery doesn't last as long...
If it has bluetooth, I'd be pretty tempted. The 770 with a folding bluetooth keyboard is great as a little device for running vim that fits in a pocket. It's underpowered for most things, but as a machine to take to write articles with while sitting in a cafe, it's great. At $35, it's basically disposable. If it breaks, I'll only be upset if the data isn't backed up...
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Every actually priced a cell phone?
Mine cost $35 with no contract (its pay-as-you-go.)
You are paying a lot more than you think for that shiny toy, they just figured out you will swallow $200 up front and finance the rest over two years a lot better than $499 up front.
You are confusing "cell phone" with "smart phone" .. stop being an idiot. Smart phones are still a large minority both in the United States as well as globally.
It is because the TracPhone is crap
So yesterdays high-end feature-phones like the Motorola RAZR are crap now? You really are an idiot. You seem to have incorrectly conflated "Touch Screen" with "Quality" and that makes you stupid.
Someone mod me troll for calling this wanker out.
"His name was James Damore."
Cue birth certificate and instructions on making Tinfoil hats.
Now, now, this is why I referred to "politicians" and not "Obama". Republicans are just as bad.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org