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Intel Aims 'One Tablet Per Child' Program at Developing Countries
retroworks writes "Digitimes Reports that 'Intel is set to push a tablet PC product codenamed StudyBook to target emerging markets. ... The StudyBook tablet PC will feature a 10-inch panel with Intel's Medfield platform and adopt dual-operating systems and will target the emerging markets such as China and Brazil. .. The StudyBook tablet PC will be released in the second half of 2012. ... Intel also hopes to push the product into regular retail channels priced below US$299.' Will this be another 'OLPC' disappointment, or is it starting to look very tough for the traditional school book industry?"
They will still be able to charge stupidly high prices, because you HAVE to get it, but they will eliminate shipping and printing costs. They just need to get the schools on board to give them lists of students, and they sue anyone who didn't buy it via approved channels.
now its one tablet. Wait, do they both? Or do the kids get to pick which one they want more?
The textbook companies love digital because they can control it and prevent resale. I bought a copy of the textbook my classroom uses for all of about $8 off Amazon. It's something like $100 new. If it were digital only, you can't buy used.
If you want to usurp the textbook companies, you need to start providing cheap, community generated alternatives. Plenty of teachers already ignore the textbooks for the most part. There's no reason Intel and other companies couldn't provide free digital content for various topics that individual schools can then assemble to fit their curriculum.
I'm currently working Khan Academy where appropriate into my classroom so students are more motivated to use it on their own time. But ultimately, I'd like to replace every chapter in the book with free alternative resources that teachers can use. "Infinite Math" is a really slick program that doesn't cost much that can generate problems for many levels of math which takes care of in class practice, homework and tests.
Work Safe Porn
How about funding lessons on computer's role in education, not bringing out a system with flaws from the ground up?
How about funding lessons on computer's role in education, not bringing out a system with flaws from the ground up?
I shrugged at this story.
Wouldn't it be great if the pharmaceutical companies tried something like this?
Intel is looking to drum up interest in a new platform and so they are trotting this out.
The pricepoint is way too high at $299 for developing countries or even developing US states.
Sigh. Every one of these initiatives fail because people assume access to technology will make people more educated, and education leads to a better life. The problem is, that's not true. What leads to a better life is taking care of basic survival needs sufficiently to allow the local population time to pursue those things. Our industrial civilization evolved away from an aquarian civilization because of advancements in certain key technologies. Tablets were not one of those technologies.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Nevermind the world gives these two all of their manufacturing, they apparently need free toys as well.
I await the 975$ Intel tablet that supplements this program, and I will laugh at it.
Wrong: Intel actually made a good choice & used Windows 7!
While you can write you own math manual, the contents and exact wording of history manuals is controversial in many countries (maybe not the US), and you just can't use another manual than the one that gained a hard-earned consensus among communities / ethnies of your country.
It's hard not to be pessimistic about this scheme. I'm sure that Intel has the engineering muscle and the cash to at least shove some units out the door(if not actually hit their targeted TDPs and battery lives) and the hardware might even be an interesting alternative to some of the present ARM SoC tablets at a similar price point; but that won't really solve the basic problem:
Actually turning computers into educational results, even in the wealthy subsections of wealthy industrialized countries where access to computers has been ubiquitous for a number of years now, has turned out to be difficult. Not necessarily impossible(and certainly a boon for the nonzero-but-hard-to-replicate autodidactic success stories); but definitely not obvious, and generally not happening in places where reasonable amounts of educational success were already being achieved by conventional methods.
It is likely that digital distribution technologies will, at some point in the reasonably near future, firmly undercut print on total price(ie. counting the units needed to read the stuff, and the infrastructure, not just the marginal cost of somebody with a computer and an internet connection snarfing Project Gutenberg), which would be a boon to anybody who has plans for producing material that don't involve paying substantial per-unit license fees; but that only brings computers to parity with print(also, it is fairly likely that sub-$100 e-ink or super-cheapy LCD devices will undercut on price well before fancy tablets do).
Shipping aggressively cheap and robust hardware is certainly a nontrivial engineering challenge, and a necessary condition of any educating-the-poor-with-computers plan; but we already have a test case, wealthy denizens of the developed world, where the hardware and infrastructure exist and we've been able to watch the pedagogical techniques and software in action. The results have not been... overly encouraging...
No chumps left behind.
That 2, before the 99, is that the new way of saying 2 for $99 ?
How can we infinitely make more small, high resource gadgets and not have a life-cycle program for them?
The true costs of the natural resources used are not reflected in the cost of electronics, for a variety of reasons, and price competition is such that "lowest possible price wins." Naturally this is a recipe for disaster. This article is just as irritating as OLPC if not more so..
Not to mention the toxics in a dense piece of electronics are a completely different story than paper books. ugh.
Oh, is Sony in on this too?
This is a pertinent quote from Steve Jobs on this OLPC-like programs which end up failing every time.
So yeah, good luck to Intel.
what you're describing is what Professor Muhammad Yunus (joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize) outlines, in his book, "Creating a World without Poverty". in it he describes the best way to achieve the results that you've highlighted.
the absolute most critical point that professor yunus makes is that you can't just go in blithely and "help" people. you *HAVE* to get them to help themselves (or at least offer them the *opportunity* to help themselves). it's none of our business - not a government and not a charity - to go dictating what's best for people. that's what's so brilliant about the micro-loans system: the PEOPLE decide what they want to do - they decide what works for them, and, out of sheer overwhelming gratitude they go for it like you just wouldn't believe.
the loan repayment success rate is so high (over 98%) that the Grameen bank actually considers it THEIR failure if people get into difficulties. compare that to an EIGHTY SEVEN percent default rate in the west (which starts to make you appreciate that there's something desperately wrong with the western mindset). the Grameen Bank is so successful that they don't even bother retaining any lawyers. at all.
it may interest you to know that one of the chapters of Professor Yunus's book calls for IT specialists to take the initiative and create some infrastructure that would help people to uplift themselves out of poverty. that still hasn't really happened yet, and i'm really perplexed and slightly frustrated that it hasn't happened.
anyway, bit of an old article that's still relevant: http://www.advogato.org/article/966.html
Given how Windows 8 seems to be more geared towards tablets, this tablet would be perfect for that platform. Load it up w/ Windows 8, and then at least, people don't need to worry about apps compatibility.
No need to bother w/ dual OSs - as far as Unix based tablets go, ARM pretty much has it sewn up.
See: http://opensource.com/life/12/1/linux-hardware-race-tiniest-and-cheapest-15-cheap
Clearly, the display will be a big cost, and integrating it as one system will add more cost, but it feels like Intel will be considerably more expensive at their published price points. I'll guess at 50% higher.
Oh, is Sony in on this too?
No, no, no!
It's one tablet per child, not one poison pill per child.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The textbook guys are really more of a political problem than a technical one. There isn't any particular connection between paper printing and buying from a vendor who retains the copyright and charges accordingly, if one were to purchase a text outright and shop around for people willing to print and bind it, the per unit bids would likely be considerably lower. As you note, there also isn't any magic connection between digital distribution and low prices. If anything, nuking the used and import markets will make the situation worse(though digital distribution does have low fixed costs, which makes small-scale and iteratively developed stuff possible IFF that is supported...)
proprietary technology needed for reading: end of civilization, i dont need to purchase a product to read a paper book. my brain has all the image recognition and translation software i need. until we have a universal, nonproprietary set of tech standards for which all electronically published material can be read, civilization is in peril
But I admit that I am radical that way.
If I buy something I want the LEGAL ability to sell that same item to someone else.
And I want them to have the LEGAL ability to sell that item to someone else. And so on and so on.
I'd worry that what sells for $10 today (no resale allowed!) will sell for $15 tomorrow (no resale allowed). And then $25. $50. $100. But with the same "no resale allowed" limit.
You hit it there... With cheap iterations there can be no used book market as well. "Oh, sorry... That was last semesters edition..." New test and questions every year FTW! (Their win, not ours)
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.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Computers are still expensive. Not nearly as much as they were, but they still could cost less.
So Windows can even have 1/2 a chance of more than what? 0.0% of the market share for mobile devices, &/or appliances, &/or HPC, &/or network infrastructure MAYBE around 0.1++% or so. Combined from home end users up through the big iron used by research community right on up to "enterprise class/mission critical" switches and routers for WANS and the Internet backbone though? Linux, rules.
Windows does ok in the low end throw away junk PC market, since it is "zero cost" because the price is hidden in the bundle price of the machine and subsidized by the shovel-ware included by the OEM (and certainly the low end server market where undocumented proprietary protocols keep vendor lock in motion and where "consultants" prefer Windows because they know they will be back every year to keep it going).
Will it work? Doubt it.
Intel has the right to dream big
But that dream won't happen in China
China will go for the ARM/Android route instead of the Atom/Win8 route offer by Intel
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If they want to get one in the hands of every child in countries like China and Brazil, their price point is at least 4X too high. It has to be scaled back.
How about One Square Meal per Child? Oh, right, there's no money in feeding them. Just make sure the tablets are edible, or repel flies. Maybe you can program the tablets to replace however many parents have been murdered or abducted from their village and forced into slavery building tablet computers, or fighting wars over imaginary creatures.
Sorry to be such a downer, it just sounds like a lot of pandering to people who feel guilty enough to care, but not enough to do something about the problems. I ask you all, and this is not rhetorical... WTF does a poor kid in a village somewhere in a place where they maybe don't even have the internet or electricity need with a tablet computer?
if you want an cheap toy for poor family ,leave it to the Chinese factories, they can do better and with lower price . but the problem is does people really want this, i don't see this in my country(China).
exactly how do the economics make sense in the third world if you can't even do this in the first world?
Think it through, twits.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Raspberry PI...
http://www.raspberrypi.org/