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Datawind Not Blowing Smoke: $38 Tablet Coming To the US
BigVig209 writes "In a follow-up to a story we discussed in May, the Chicago Tribune is reporting that London-based Datawind it will begin selling its $38 UbiSlate tablet computer in the U.S. early next year. 'The $38 7-inch touchscreen UbiSlate 7Ci tablet runs on Google's Android 4.0 and features a 1-gigahertz, single-core processor. It has 4 gigabytes of storage with microSD card slots for additional storage. The 7-inch display offers a resolution of 800x480 pixels.' The specs aren't the greatest, fastest, or most powerful, but, for under $50, they're still pretty decent."
With those being cheaper than most textbooks, I think we can see more e-textbooks being popular in the future.
That's a world of difference, Capacitive or Resistive is the difference between a budget and a usable tablet
moox. for a new generation.
After MS clears you out for an XB One, you can buy a cheap tablet for their Smartglass "second screen" app.
Datawind is always late to the party. They make big annoucements about incredibly inexpensive items years in the future to generate interest. Then by the time they're actually selling something, everyone else has passed them by. Even now, you can pickup a tablet with similar specs from walmart for $50. By the time we see any DW tablets on the shelves, several companies will be selling $40 tablets, or better.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Amazon's kinder reader app will let you read electronic comics, but not on a desktop (DRM disallows it), and on the handheld devices it *does not zoom*. Ridiculous!
I believe Google's reader will allow zoom, but the tablet is very expensive. If this will serve as a cheap electronic comic book reader that supports zoom, I'm in.
Economies of scale I suppose...
Picture every nurse in a hospital with one in their pocket. Picture 3rd graders taking spelling tests with these. Picture every coffee-shop waitress with one. Picture these replacing smart thermostats and TV remotes, anything with a reasonably sophisticated (i.e. > on/off) UI.
Okay... the price per square inch is great... now just make one with a 14" diagonal (ie, about a4 or letter size) with the same resolution and at the same cost per square inch (so about $160 or so for the tablet) and I'll be all over it like maple syrup on pancakes.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Android 4.0 is totally worthless. Try again when you can do 4.2 and run google play store apps. I've been burned by this on a $70 tablet. Never again.
I've purchased two barrel-bottom-scraping androids so far (not this model), with the expectation that that should be able to satisfy very basic needs like ebook reading.
I was wrong.
These 'landfill android' devices garbage in every possible way. Battery life is so poor that you can't even even expect it to last a day on stand by. Yet performance is so poor that you have to wait a good several minutes just for the damn thing to boot up, so forget about quickly pulling it out while on the bus to read a few pages.
And the wifi is so bad that it can't pick up a signal unless you have a router in the very same room, and even then you somehow don't get full bars.
The only use I can see for this class of devices, is in BDSM scenarios:
Master - Check my email, slave!
Slave - Yes Master, thank you master! Oh, I can't connect to the server!
Master - Are you telling me that you're failing me, you miserable wretch?
Slave - Nuh Matha! Ih I puf mah tong oh he corneh, wifi worgs!
Master - Good slave! Now play Words With Friends!
Slave - *whimper*
It seems we're getting closer to replacing paper once and for all.
So, someone has invented a cheap digital data storage method that will last thousands of years?
There's a reason tombstones are still big-ass etched stones, and not digital displays, you know.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
How difficult is it to install another version of Android on devices like this? I would love to use something like this as a console-on-the-go, but would hate to deal with advertising crap while I'm trying to do work.
http://www.xda-developers.com/
Your answer should be contained within.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
well...if $38 is too rich for your blood..there is always this..
http://www.dhgate.com/product/lenovo-lepad-a2207-lenovo-idea-tab-a2207a/178135882.html#s1-14-1|1005834550 ...AND it's Lenova!
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Devices like these, and the equivalent devices in the phone arena, help keep Android "market share" figures nice and plump!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Amazon's selling Kindles today for just $49
http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2013/12/17/amazon-discounts-kindles-to-49/
Granted it's a one-day Christmas promotion, but it just shows they can drop prices pretty low. (Especially since they're hoping to make it all back with ebook sales...)
...whoops didn't notice that minimum order...
never mind.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
There have been $30 tablets available in Shentzen for a year. Most have an Allwinner ARM SOIC, which is a very cheap part yet quite powerful. It costs $1100 to move an entire shipping container from Shentzen to Los Angeles. Not clear what the hold-up has been.
Tablets will be sold in bubble-packs at the drugstore.
The One Laptop Per Child project should change its focus from hardware to software. Whether this tablet is suitable for kids, or some other tablet, they can count on inexpensive Android tablets being available.
Could kids use these things for reading textbooks? Yes. Could kids run educational software that drills them on math and other subjects? Yes. Could kids even watch movies, look things up on Wikipedia, learn to touch-type with a USB or Bluetooth keyboard? Yes, yes, yes. Tablets like these are adequate for learning.
Will OLPC ever achieve massive economy of scale by making its own branded devices? Signs point to "no". Wikipedia reports that OLPC has shipped over 2.4 million laptops in its first 6 years; in comparison, Wikipedia reports that the Google Nexus 7 tablet sold over 4.5 million units in its first year, and over 7 million to date (less than 2.5 years).
I understand that OLPC has several goals, and that one of the goals is that OLPC devices be repairable. But a school could literally buy three of these DataWind tablets for the cost of a single XO-4! Suppose someone made a bundle of a DataWind, a protective case and a keyboard; that should all come in for less than half the cost of an XO-4. Never mind repairs, just buy twice as many of the things.
OLPC should make Android software, and lesson plans for teachers, but shouldn't build their own hardware anymore.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Alibaba is filled with tablets retailing for this sort of price. I assume Datawind just made a bulk purchase and is selling them for a small margin.
It's a consumer product. They'll sell a lot less of it if they introduce it in January than if they'd gotten it out Dec. 1, much less pre-Black-Friday.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Tablets are just big smart phones. Bigger allows for a bigger screen and bigger (longer lasting) battery.
800x480 was a mid-range phone more than three years ago. Mid range and high range phones have more pixels now.
It is possible that this device has a decent battery but, at $50,I'm skeptical of that too. So, why should anyone buy this tablet instead of a three year old smart phone on eBay?
I've got a Coby 10" tablet running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (i.e. really vanilla, with no manufacturer's software value added.) It'll run Google Play Store apps just fine.
The main thing it's missing is a program to sync the calendar with MS Outlook or at least accept iCal events; it really really wants you to sync its calendar app with Google Calendar, and I'm not going to sync my $DAYJOB calendar with Google. The free Play Store apps to do this haven't been very reliable, and $30 is more than I want to gamble for a commercial program that may not be any better.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...the kind that starts out regarded by the established players as almost a joke, who ignore it because its not what the important customers are asking for, just some bargain-hunting fools... then the low-end, joke product develops its own specialized market, gradually improves, starts eating the lunch of the big guys, and somehow they fade away.
The Ford Model Twas regarded as such a piece of junk the "Ford joke" became a genre in itself, and people published entire BOOKS of nothing but Ford jokes. "Does your Ford make a racket?" "Oh, no, only when it's running" etc.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I didnt see a spec on RAM - anyone know what it ships with? I recently bought a Samsung Centura which has very similar specs as this tablet, and it has left me wanting.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
It's obviously true just from browsing numbers alone... but there's articles like this that say the same thing (in the phone/phablet world).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...of which my 20-year-old paperbacks are already starting to disintegrate, and that's not even taking into account the bindings.*
The good thing about digital books is that it's trivial to "rebind" them when the reader dies. Not so easy with paperbacks.
*My older paperbacks are actually in much better shape, but novel publication appears to have moved to a cheaper paper and binding glue around 20 years ago.
So, someone has invented a cheap digital data storage method that will last thousands of years?
No, but someone has invented something cheap that stops working when it gets rained on and can't be repaired when you damage it.
There's a reason tombstones are still big-ass etched stones, and not digital displays, you know.
And there's also a good reason they aren't made of paper.
It has a MicroSD slot. Funny how only low-end devices are expandable these days.
So, someone has invented a cheap digital data storage method that will last thousands of years?
No, but someone has invented something cheap that stops working when it gets rained on and can't be repaired when you damage it.
A hard drive? Oh, no, you said cheap.
There's a reason tombstones are still big-ass etched stones, and not digital displays, you know.
And there's also a good reason they aren't made of paper.
... as well as a good reason why the information plate bolted to the side of the Voyager probe isn't made of paper, either.
Look, I ain't saying that paper is the be-all-end-all of communication methods; I'm just pointing out that anyone who thinks digital electronics will be a replacement for paper anytime in the near future is dreaming of pipes.
TL;DR version: sure, paper might suck, but digital storage sucks more.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Regular paperbacks are generally of noticeably higher quality than "Mass Market Paperbacks" (which are the small-ish versions sold in most supermarkets and such).
The Mass Market variety aren't really designed to last. They're meant to be read once or twice (if ever) and if they tear up after that just toss them.
If you're buying a book for a collection you want to buy a higher quality version.
That said - I'm not sure why they charge what they do for the better versions. Barnes and noble puts out very good quality hard-cover versions of some public domain books for less than $10. That's generally less than the price difference between the MMPB and the hardcover version of most books, so you're actually paying a lot more than just the additional materials cost there.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So, someone has invented a cheap digital data storage method that will last thousands of years?
There's a reason tombstones are still big-ass etched stones, and not digital displays, you know.
Gosh, you might just have stumbled on the next big thing.
You know these annoyingly bright, giant, color led displays along the highway? Imagine that integrated into a tombstone, showing the dearly departed smiling and waiving and if someone walks by, serving them with some ads: "Don't do what I did. Call a qualified electrician."
Not all of them http://www.vidstone.com/ProductsGeneral.aspx?productID=26
And I'm pretty sure none of the books I have on my bookcases are big-ass etched stones either. I also suspect there's a better chance of one of my e-books still existing in 2,000 years than one of my paperbacks. I doubt either will, but the paperback is more likely to become ash in a house fire or mush in a flood than the file.
Regular paperbacks are generally of noticeably higher quality than "Mass Market Paperbacks" (which are the small-ish versions sold in most supermarkets and such).
The Mass Market variety aren't really designed to last. They're meant to be read once or twice (if ever) and if they tear up after that just toss them.
If you're buying a book for a collection you want to buy a higher quality version.
That said - I'm not sure why they charge what they do for the better versions. Barnes and noble puts out very good quality hard-cover versions of some public domain books for less than $10. That's generally less than the price difference between the MMPB and the hardcover version of most books, so you're actually paying a lot more than just the additional materials cost there.
You're paying copyright fees. With the $10 books, the content is usually public domain, so you're only paying for the price of printing and cost of materials. When you're buying a paperback, you're purchasing the right to read the work for as long as the book lasts (which has been getting shorter and shorter on the mass market paperbacks). With the higher quality hardcover books, often printed on acid-free paper, you're purchasing the right to read the same content for as long as copyright lasts, barring accidental (or intentional) destruction of the book.
Look at the Peterson's Field Guide for a paperback* that bucks this trend, and has a price to reflect it.
*It's not really paper, as they use cotton and plastic in the material as well -- this is a book designed to be dropped in a duck pond or snagged on brambles and come out none the worse for wear.
...that will last thousands of years?
There's a reason tombstones are still big-ass etched stones...
Even those "big-ass etched stones" don't last thousands of years, outside of dry environments like Egypt. Take a stroll through an old* cemetery and you'll find tombstones that are less than 500 years old that are unreadable.
* Note for Americans...you pretty much have to leave your country to find one.
Whats the industry ratio of circuit boards manufactured per month versus circut boards recycled per month? The eWaste stream is worth thinking about and should be included in the price of electronics. Maybe tablets shouldnt be $38 because so many of them will get thrown away, with their toxic components in a landfill that eventually leaks into the groundwater.
So, someone has invented a cheap digital data storage method that will last thousands of years?
There's a reason tombstones are still big-ass etched stones, and not digital displays, you know.
Gosh, you might just have stumbled on the next big thing.
You know these annoyingly bright, giant, color led displays along the highway? Imagine that integrated into a tombstone, showing the dearly departed smiling and waiving and if someone walks by, serving them with some ads: "Don't do what I did. Call a qualified electrician."
I can appreciate any innovation that makes reality more like an episode of Futurama.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Not all of them http://www.vidstone.com/ProductsGeneral.aspx?productID=26
Ha, what a trip! $1500 for an LCD panel ($2400 if you opt for the 5 year anti-vandalism warranty)? Proves the old adage, 'a fool and his money are soon parted.'
Really, if you absolutely had to memorialize someone that way, you'd be better off buying one of those $20 commercial digital photo frames, wiring it to a solar panel, and drilling a couple mounting screws into the stone monument (which would have the added advantage of removable parts, since something will eventually fail).
I also suspect there's a better chance of one of my e-books still existing in 2,000 years than one of my paperbacks.
Then you have far more faith in digital storage media than I. FWIW, to this day they're digging up perfectly preserved, 2,000 year old scrolls in Mesopotamia. Your electronics will not last that long, and one good, solid solar flare is all it would take to completely wipe out all digitally stored media the world over.
I doubt either will, but the paperback is more likely to become ash in a house fire or mush in a flood than the file.
If you store them properly, then yes, the paperback books will still exist in 2,000 years. The e-books on your Kindle? Well, if you turn it off RIGHT NOW there might be a few read/write cycles left by that point in time, but the leakage from the battery will have rendered the entire thing a useless lump of minerals long before, no matter how well you store it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The GameBoy doesn't have a clock either. Didn't stop us from having tons of fun playing games on it.
That's because they had to put the clock in the cartridge. Games that make heavy use of the clock, such as Animal Crossing, had to wait for the DS that had its own clock.
If it can do games, reading, and play videos, none of which require a clock, or even network connectivity
A reliable clock is needed for making sure that the (agreed-upon) rental period for your rented video hasn't expired.
If you know someone who runs a store, then buying a lot of 50 for $80 a piece and selling them as an impulse buy for $99.95 might bring in some sales.
Regular paperbacks are generally of noticeably higher quality than "Mass Market Paperbacks" (which are the small-ish versions sold in most supermarkets and such).
Not anymore.
Not clear what the hold-up has been.
Patents perhaps? Microsoft owns exclusive rights in the FAT file system and Exchange protocol. That and possibly import duties, which in some countries are known to exceed 100% of the declared value.
So, why should anyone buy this tablet instead of a three year old smart phone on eBay?
Because not everybody likes to squint at tiny text.
Microcenter already sells a $39 Azpen A700 with the exact same specs. What am I missing?
I could see this as a good XBMC remote or alarm clock that shows weather when you get up or news if you made a nice stand for it. Maybe something to use in the bathtub or on the toilet to read stuff or the kitchen for recipes. Places where if it gets dirty or ruined who cares.
"It seems we're getting closer to replacing paper once and for all."
Mod up "Funny".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
> The $38 7-inch touchscreen UbiSlate 7Ci tablet runs on Google's Android 4.0
Since when has hardware "run on" software?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I set a world record in a game with over 10,000,000 players with this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834686016
And it has a dedicated GPU and 1GB of DDR3. Not 512MB of DDR3 or 1GB of DDR2 like others.
Yes, because of course people will do hundreds of hours of work for free.
They will, as it turns out. You'll find countless examples on the internet. Not everyone is as selfish as you.
But many are being subsidized for their work online --- or hope to see a payoff down the road.
Writing a book of any kind is a major accomplishment that relatively few can claim. Anyone who learns that you're a published book author will be impressed. Similarly, if you use your textbook in one of your classes, your stature with your students will rise. You'll also gain name recognition among psychologists because most textbooks are referred to by the author's names rather than the title.
Writing Phase: 2 to 4+ Years. Writing has two meanings. Narrowly, it refers to composing the words in the text, including multiple drafts and several rounds of peer reviews and revisions based on the reviews. Broadly, writing also includes all the necessary reading of sources, compiling references, conceptualizing illustrations, and designing and writing features (e.g., boxed material), learning exercises, review sections, and further resources for students.
Writing a Psychology Textbook: Is It For You ?
it is supposed to be London-based Datawind said it will begin selling"... As in TFA, poor summary as usual
The product is targeted at the India K-12 market. Approximately a billion students will pass through there over the next decade, and the idea is to subsidize half so the student pays only $20 - or in some cases nothing. I think they'll be OK on volume.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Cheap tablets are already selling for under $50, like the Azpen model that Micro Center has recently offered for $40. The Datawind tablet has similar specs.
Somebody remind the Ubuntu team to "stay the course".
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.