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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."
Have you priced E-Text books lately? Maybe it's because I'm looking at college level stuff, but they get a LOT of money just to let you use their book for 6 months and a whole lot more to get the book forever. I just don't see that happening until the publishers back off the rental prices.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Which will of course be FAR more expensive than the textbooks were.
I don't get the impression that e-textbooks ever actually save anybody money as the publishers just jack up the prices.
I knew someone who worked in a library, and they got all excited about e-books, only to realize they spent about 50% or more of the annual book buying budget to get it set up and get just a half a dozen e-books. They ended up with far far less than if they'd bought traditional books, because they'd have been able to buy hundreds of books for what they spent.
At the end of the day, it makes more money for the publisher, but a small community library got absolutely burned in the process, and only ended up with a handful of books, and limited benefit
I can't imagine school boards would fare any better.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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*
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).
I'm hoping to see a trend where professors or graduate students write new textbooks and just contribute them to the public domain. Inexpensive tablets plus free textbooks means inexpensive education.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4123035&cid=44658533
It's still early days with ebooks, really. The publishers want to keep the prices high, but the barriers to entry into the market are low. Free textbooks will disrupt the pricing model.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The last 'ebook' I bought was for an astrophysics class. A mandatory $190 license to access a textbook online for three months. By Pearson of course. No one should be pleased with how things are going.
It has a MicroSD slot. Funny how only low-end devices are expandable these days.