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Low-Cost Indian Tablet Project Falls To Corruption
symbolset writes "The first Aakash tablet proposed for India schools has failed. Datawind managed to deliver the $45 Android tablet as reported here previously, but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold. Facing a loss in revenue it's turning into a disaster for the small Canadian company as they are now proving unable to deliver both the Aakash tablet and the parallel retail product. Senior executives have begun to flee. The company has presold a great many tablets, and delivery failure reports are beginning to mount. Is this the Phantom console of this decade?"
Get the money first and then manufacture the product.
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
incomeptent contracts != corruption
India? Corruption? You don't say...
if they can't get their own projects right, why pay them to do ours?
there's rampant overcharging. sure it's half the cost per developer, but you need 6-20 times more developers to get the same work done. not to mention the cost of having your managers telling them what to do in great detail.
i personally stand with ceo's over union workers, but how can the ceos be so stupid as to outsource IT?
Wtf, slashdot? Can't you at least correct grammatical errors before publishing stories?
I don't know what town you live in (or who is paying you to live there), but to most people, Google and Android stand for options. If you want to save money, you can get a cheap Android device. If you want to pay for quality, you can get a quality Android device. You can put whatever you want on your own device. And I don't think any reasonable person would expect a $45 Android tablet to have the same capabilities or quality as an iPad, and it doesn't need to if you look at what it's designed for: to make technology available in a non-1st world state.
Of course, the nature of your post and the fact that your ID is almost as high as the National Debt show you are nothing more than a paid (at least I hope you are at least getting paid) astroturfer trying to make Google look bad. The truth is that Google is nowhere near the "bad joke around town". People like you are, though. Subtlety, try it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
about corruption in India?
People seem to be surprised that Akash tablets are turning out to be failures.The cost factor was a big lie and so it will be revised.
There are tablets available for $70-$75 range.Take a look at olivepad v-tr200 specs.You will be surprised that its there and shipping.
Not that it ought to be good...but cost reduction is possible.
http://www.olivetelecom.in/laptop/olivepad/vtr-200.html
From what I can tell, they got the tender, did all the groundwork, then the group they were collaborating with came out with new impossible to achieve specs, backed up by the government, and their subcontractor wandered off to create a competing product.
What a pity, but it looks like they've been had.
I don't know if it's fair to still call DataWind a Canadian company. Yes, it was founded in Montreal, but ... R&D is in Montreal.. management is in the UK.
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what is it with black people and the bus stop? anytime you see a bus stop, there is always a black person there.
This is just plain wrong. It is true though that no-matter how empty a bus may be, or how nice and sunny the day, there will always be at least 1 person at the stop who, when the bus arrives, will shove their way right up to the door to rush on there. It's as if they're on fire, waiting in line to be dowsed with water.
You can't bend the laws of physics and economics. The biggest, most influential company in the tablet space still gets to pay roughly ~$200-$220 for the bill of materials to produce their devices. That's with their negotiating prowess when dealing with component suppliers.
A $45 device, even if subsidized implies a) no profit drive b) BOM that's essentially not enough to even cover the cost of the screen, c) compromises up the ass, d) no support.
These types of things should always be shunned and criticized. Let the free market sort these things out by itself. If the users are too poor to afford a tablet they probably have bigger problems to begin with, and some half-assed linux device with terrible usability is hardly a necessity.
Couple this with traditional government incompetencies, you need several parties in the chain to get a taste. You could do that with high-margin electronics. With a device that's essentially free it's damn near impossible. Everyone likes the idea of helping poor people to gain access to information but that's a theoretical exercise. In the real world you need a profit motive of some kind.
Even Android tablets that cost 400 dollars are barely usable, EOL'd from the moment you unpack it, and lack a tested and proven toolchain to deploy in enterprise settings. You can't outsource your IT operations to XDA forums and be at the whims of 16 year old ROM flashers to fix your shit with some custom firmware because the company that produces the tablet doesn't know how to do software.
Maybe I'm addressing the wrong crowd, seeing how OLPC has been given a pass for many years on /. when it should have been ridiculed from the very beginning.
There's another Italian company producing a product called I'm watch. They've been taking preorders for about a year and it looks like they're going to stiff people as well. And the smart watches aren't cheap. Starting price of >$400.
This project needs to die, and die fast. It doesn't matter just how it happens, it's a colossal waste of money. Datawind were trying to sell awful junk for more than it costs to just buy a bit less awful junk from China. The Indian government department concerned is clueless about technology, from the minister all the way down.
Shameless self promotion, but very relevant: you can read my old blog entry about the folly of this project here: http://colourmeamused.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/4/
The reason for poor internet penetration at this point isn't that much to do with cost right now. There are many many people who can well afford to get internet access and afford basic but adequate computing devices in India but don't. Maybe we should start with those people first. I'll write something about the state of internet penetration in India, if anyone's interested you can subscribe to the blog if wordpress lets you do that.
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.
Coming from a third world country I can tell:
The more poorer a country more corruption it has.
And please do not refute using 'per capita' income (the arabs country have higher 'per capita' but it seems only for the 'choosen ones')
Sad but true...
The Indian govt wants to give the tablet to students.
But there are very few good educational apps for Android.
"If I see one more spate of unintelligible posts about Gamemaker from multiple accounts (at least 4) owned by the same jackass, I'm gonna slit my wrists."
Useless. Find HIM and slit HIS wrists instead.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
There are a dozen of such low quality crap ( very similar price range even without subsidization ) on the free market . Even if it was a success , what would it even have accomplished ? other than giving hundreds of teenagers tablets , paid with tax-payer money , for movies music , porn and facebook ?
And this wouldn't help to increase internet penetration in India either . Almost everyone , including the homeless , owns a mobile phone ( with large enough screens and internet connectivity ) , and I'm yet to see them so much as even try to open a wikipedia page .
If the government really wanted to help , they could have funded research of cheap e-ink displays .Because thats what we students really need , cheap ebook readers for reading the shitload of books totally unavailable domestically and not flashy multimedia devices with cheap displays that bore a hole in your eye if you try to use it for more than an hour.
Corruption? I didn't see any mention of it in either the two-part New York Times piece or the article linked from India's Economic Times. Or is it automatically assumed that when a project of this nature fails in India corruption has to be the cause?
The company should consider Thailand as a new market:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/289685/school-tablet-concerns-mount
Poor me. Just on the off chance that it might work, I also pre-booked for one of the commercial versions. (I live in India and am a retired person who while not needing to count his pennies, cant afford to buy a high end tablet when I dont have assured connectivity).
That said there a are few Indian IT companies (existing from pre Y2K, internet boom days) who are now marketing commercial grade tablets addressing the same market.
Most have a good dealer network built over the years and I would think Indian users can begin considering these models.
OK.
Success and Failures are part of the game. The fact is that datawind Akash tablet was made with specs not too many would want to buy. It would have been far more beneficial to make a regular tablet and then reduce its cost based on volumes. (capacitive screen and RAM in particular, more flash space also needed).
Govt has not given up, it is going for a better tablet and datawind can bid for it.
I dont think corruption is the key factor here. The 2G scam has created such a scare in the Govt that no one is ready to take decisions, and pushing all of them to the PM office. Hats off to Sibbal for taking this risk !
"We had to send daily reports to the CEO, which would in turn justify our salary. Failure to do so meant a deduction in that days's wage," said a vice president, who resigned on the same grounds.
Any company that responds to crisis like that was never going to make it anyways.
That 1GHz PIII is faster than a 1GHz Arm chip out now. It would *fly* with any of the smartphone/tablet OS's.
Remember, these things are not normally running full-blown general-purpose linux distros.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_in_India_(state_wise)
Casteism