Slashdot Mirror
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.
Sorry, but 1024x600 is a terrible resolution. The small screen may be acceptable at this price, but the resolution is not. 1GB of RAM and the MTK CPU also make for a painful experience. So it does suck, even now, and certainly even more so next year.
That being said you can get some decent tablets for $100. But somehow everybody is already on the internet, and these cheap tablets have not caused any of the predicted revolutions.
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.