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What Might a $50 Tablet Inspire? (arstechnica.com)
theodp writes: Surprisingly, says Ars Technica's review of Amazon's $50 Fire tablet, it doesn't suck. "There's simply very little reason to spend more when you can get 90 percent of the functionality for a fraction of the price," writes Mark Walton. "The only real niggle right now with the Fire Tablet is the display (and the camera, if you really want to take photos with your tablet). Once budget tabs start coming with 1080p displays as standard, the writing really will be on wall. For now, the Amazon Fire Tablet is the budget tablet to beat." How does cheap technology like this mesh with Bill Gates's dream of putting a computer in every home, and projects like OLPC? Beyond that, any thoughts on what a $50 tablet price point might inspire in education, gaming, and other areas?
It still costs over $50/month for an internet connection in most households, and that's if you're lucky enough to have internet available at your house. People who are unable to purchase a $100-$200 tablet are going to be equally incapable of maintaining a mothly subscription.
Maybe someday we'll see "mobile" OS's that allow for greater disconnection, but the current trend with storage and content tranfer is totally against this customer empowered idea.
What would we do without visionaries like Bill Gates imagining cheaper computers? Without him, people would have gotten confused and made computers more and more expensive!
And the difference between Kindle and other low cost devices: the Kindle isn't intended to be hackable. In fact, the $50 is really a subsidized price.
A Tablet is not a computer. It is some kind of restricted interface digital device, made for content consumption and based around pictogram interfaces. Computers, personal computers, were always envisaged as flexible, customisable, programmable general purpose devices, based around computer and natural language inputs. Up to the last few years, most were.
Tablets ape the general purpose functions of PCs by having glut of low quality, shocking single purpose apps, but no way to tie these together. Even the simplest of functionality, saving, copying, pasting, editing, is in most cases absent, locked down, or only partially available on these digital devices. Tablets are not computers in the traditional sense, and are far closer to devices like phones, TVs and video game consoles. Digital, but in general not user programmable.
So it is no surprise to see such a device reach full "functionality" at a $50 price point. That is the true worth of the usage they provide.
Bill Gate's dream is a world completely run by proprietary software, and a business model subsidized by government enforced statutory monopoly.
Artificial barriers to entry is exactly preventing technology from being available to the underprivileged.
The idea that Gates wants ANYBODY to have cheap computing technology is laughable. Water? Fine. Anything more advance than that? Tough luck. Pay your lords, serfs.
I got one too. I installed Firefox on it with adblocker and ghostery and use it as my main couch reading gadget with readly, feedly, and all the flip-thingies.
I got Amazon, Aliexpress and eBay and for buying stuff it's just great. Also to stream movies from my server to the bathtub. :-) , the case cost half the price of the tablet, a bit steep IMO.
I always get the toddler cases, because they allow a much more relaxed grip but in this case
it inspires nothing. It's a device wholly build around consumption of existing content and not creation.
Now, a $50 general purpose computer? That'll inspire something.
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What Might a $50 Tablet Inspire?
Surely it would inspire the same thing that a fucking color TV in every home has already inspired:
complete and utter stupidity.
Really, again, so what. There are a zillion things you can do on a tablet like this without an internet connection at all, so long as you can get to one *sometimes*.
Download a few books, you don't need a connection to read them. Many games don't require one either. Likewise utility apps.
Tablets are very flexible devices. A constant internet connection is not required to get a great deal out of using one.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A comupter in every home was not the dream of Bill Gates. It was the dream of guys like Woz, Ed Roberts, Les Solomon and the Homebrew Computer Club.
Bioll Gates dream was to have a Microsoft OS running on every computer on every desktop.