Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
It has a capacitive display.
http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/review-datawind-ubislate-7ci/1/190518.html
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*
Picture them all with a device made by someone else.
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
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
Personally, I would buy a $38 tablet provided it actually worked for a reasonable amount of time (1-2 years), and could do some basic tasks. I don't want to tote around my $500 tablet everywhere I go, but it would be nice to have a cheap device that I didn't care so much if I dropped it, or it got too cold and ceased to function. It doesn't have to be a replacement for the iPad or any other tablet at that price. People will buy an iPad (or similarly high priced tablet, like Galaxy Tab/Note or Surface2), as well as a cheap $40 tablet to take with them when they don't want to have something expensive on them. Same reason why many people who own a DSLR also have a cheap point and shoot. And same reason why I would buy that $15 Nokia phone if it ever sees the light of day. There are certain things people do where they don't want to be carrying around thousands of dollars of electronics.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A 40 inch diagonal screen has more than 16 times the area of an an ipad mini, which wouldn't exactly be very cheap.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Has no one here shopped online?
Here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3DC17C8972
It's $44. Granted, that's $6 more, but that's certainly in the same ballpark, and it has (arguably) better specs (dual core, dual cameras, android 4.2, etc).
Or here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0EJ-0019-00005
This one is just $34.99. It's only 4.3", but it has a 1.2GHz A8, and Android 4.2.
I don't know why this is making slashdot... 'el cheap-o tablets are already here in every form you could ask for. Most of the cheap ones sacrifice battery life first, which sucks, but corners must be cut if you're going to be the cheapest thing with a touchscreen... and in some cases, a short battery life is not a deal breaker (ex. car computer; kitchen wall mounted touch display; media controller; etc).
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
AND it's Lenova!
No good. I'm holding out for a genuine Sorny, Panaphonic or Magnetbox.
It has a MicroSD slot. Funny how only low-end devices are expandable these days.
That "$44" tablet has a shipping price of $23.
Granted, shipping usually isn't free (even when listed as such it's built into the price of the item), but a $20+ shipping price is just a lie. They're building most of the item price into the shipping price to make it look cheaper.
Yes the 4.3" device is actually $35 shipped but at that size I consider that a touch screen media player rather than a "tablet".
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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.
I don't know if it was the crap hardware (it was Samsung, after all) or the crap software (it was a Samsung OEM Android, after all), but my experience with the Galaxy Note tablet was less than stellar, and they used, IIRC, a Wacom digitizer. For some reason, though, new out of the box, it suffered from horrible input lag.
Okay, I'll be fair. It was "bad" input lag which was graduated to "horrible" in the face of the $500 price tag.
Ended up returning it, getting a Transformer, and going back to waiting for a cheap-ish digitizer-equipped tablet for sketching.
displays the time, weather
I have this app in my bathroom that displays the weather. It runs on Windows (yeah I know Windows sucks). All I have to do is look out of it. It also has a touch interface. I can doodle on it when it's a bit misted up.
SJW n. One who posts facts.