6 ms·

India's $35 tablet ready to ship

111 points by namank 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ditojim 15y ago
Android FTW!
wccrawford 15y ago
Revised to $50, per the article. But still, at $50, it's quite a nice toy. And if it encourages -anyone- to read, it's doing a good thing.
raganwald 15y ago
To paraphrase a line from Stuart Brand's amazing book The Media Lab: "Hardware wants to be free."
rb2k_ 15y ago
I personally get really annoyed at those "will ship in x days" announcements. It's almost impossible to tell when those are marketing vs actual facts. I believe it when I can buy it on Amazon/eBay/... and it gets delivered within a week.
- grannyg00se 15y ago
  I agree. If it was "ready to ship" it would be shipping.
pitchups 15y ago
If it is even half as good as the video demo, it will be a huge success IMHO.
statictype 15y ago
Impressive. What corners had to be cut in order to keep the cost down to such a level.
- martythemaniak 15y ago
  Resistive screen for one - notice the stylus. Also, probably old hardware and little RAM. While the difference between this tablet and the Samsung Tab or iPad may be huge, the difference between no computer and this one is far far bigger.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - adamdecaf 15y ago
    In the video they mentioned "2gb" of ram.
  - nrbafna 15y ago
    7" Resistive touch screen, 32GB hard disk, 2GB RAM, 2 USB ports, WiFi. http://techpp.com/2011/06/15/indias-low-cost-sakshat-tablet-launching-this-month-for-49/ http://techpp.com/2011/06/15/indias-low-cost-sakshat-tablet-...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Calamitous 15y ago
  Looks like a resistive touchscreen (stylus required) as opposed to a capacitive one.
- justanotheratom 15y ago
  There is usually a lot of government subsidy involved in things like these.
Zakuzaa 15y ago
Assuming India has 250 Million students who could make use of such a device. If every one of them is given this tablet: 250 Million * $35 (will probably be even lesser when produced in such a massive quantity) = ~9 Billion USD Add distribution and other chores.. takes it to ~10 Billion USD. To add some perspective, India's infamous 2G scam is 5 times bigger than that. [Edit]: Costs could go even lower if the device is ad supported, like kindle.
- joshu 15y ago
  2g scam?
  - nrbafna 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam
pitdesi 15y ago
http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indias_35_tablet_Sakshat_to_roll_out_this_month-nid-84825.html http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indias_35_tablet_Saksha... this article indicates that they will ship 10,000 units to IIT Rajasthan late this month, but 90k more units will be available over the next several months... but why? There are only a few hundred students there. I'll believe it when I see it.
sandGorgon 15y ago
Here comes the relevance from an earlier discussion of mine http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623722 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623722 - "Nobody in India uses computers in Indian languages". This tablet can revolutionize rural education, especially since the Indian govt mandates rural connectivity as a pre-requisite to handing out telecom wireless licenses. But you cannot teach village kids in English - especially, if in a few years they have to go and read the land records, inheritance documents, local newspapers which are in regional vernacular. But the system is running Android - guess what is the top request on the Android bug list? (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?sort=-stars http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?sort=-stars) Arabic language support. Same problem as Indic fonts. Same problem on all Linuxes.
- lallysingh 15y ago
  .. but Arabic isn't terribly huge in India. Hindi is. Edit: Ah, thanks for the clarification.
  - jimbobimbo 15y ago
    OP: "Same problem as Indic fonts."
- nrbafna 15y ago
  Android 2.3 did bring in support for Hindi and Arabic. <http://www.talkandroid.com/22956-android-2-3-gingerbread-doubles-language-support-from-2-2-froyo/&#62 http://www.talkandroid.com/22956-android-2-3-gingerbread-dou...; Though, I doubt if the tablet would be able to run Gingerbread.
  - sandGorgon 15y ago
    not sure if that is entirely true - this bug is still open http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1618 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1618 Again, if they still used a non-smartfont technology for compound scripts (I think that's what they call when two alphabets join together to form a new alphabet), it wont really solve the problem.
mortenjorck 15y ago
Hardware is the most obvious part of the equation, and it's amazing to see that part nearing solved. The less obvious, but no less important part, however, is software. What will these things run? Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio aren't going to help kids learn to read, build an understanding of the world around them, and ultimately create value in society. I'm sure you can come up with a handful of "educational" apps from the Android Marketplace, but for these to really be valuable in schools, they're going to need professionally-developed, curriculum-integrated software, and teachers are going to need to be trained in using it to its potential. Having a $50/$35/$10 tablet sets the stage for great things, but that's all it does. It enables real advances in education, but it won't make those advances by itself.
- nrbafna 15y ago
  A major problem with education in rural India is the lack of (qualified) regular teachers. So, _if_ we could provide decent internet access, it will open them up to good resources on the internet, like Khan Academy. Though, it is only natural for us to be skeptic, it may well be worth a try.
- Steko 15y ago
  "Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio aren't going to help kids learn to read" Straw man alert. It should be incredibly obvious that the tablets will have etexts, note taking, html lessons and quizzes, flash cards, etc. In short all the things kids do to learn 100 or 50 or 20 years ago but with the efficiency of a converged device.
- code_duck 15y ago
  >What will these things run? Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio [...] Why focus on apps? What they will run is a web browser. Being able to connect to the HTML/Web platform is more important than the OS. Of course a single hardware device does not solve all of the issues in education. While a browser is not educational software in itself, any internet connected device with a browser has great potential to do the things you list. If nothing else, they can connect to Wikipedia in 100 languages.
jim_h 15y ago
It's hard to tell how the performance will be. In the video any actual footage of the device in use was sped up. As others have said, I'll believe it when I see it.
- jerf 15y ago
  In a way, the real question isn't "How do apps written for more powerful devices perform?", but "How will apps written specifically for this device perform?" Is the hardware merely underpower relative to current Android apps, or is the device fundamentally full of large amounts of latency in many subsystems?
r00fus 15y ago
Ok, so what happened to the simputer? Apparently the project is considered a failure after releasing only thousands of the devices. Tack onto that the failure of XO/OLPC, and you have all these successive efforts to get cheap computing devices in the hands of children, hoping like magic, the device will herald a transformation of education in rural villages. Will an android tablet succeed where the others failed? Unless we know why the other projects failed, I don't see why this one would succeed.
- TruthElixirX 15y ago
  How did XO/OLPC fail? I'm curious, I quit following the project. I thought it just never really got off the ground. Was that the only failure or something different?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
walexander 15y ago
I wonder what this means for the OLPC tablet? $35-50 to equip kids with this thing at two to three times the volume of a $100+ XO3 (which to this point is vaporware apparently, I can only find concept art) seems like a good idea to me.
mnazim 15y ago
I live in India and here are my thoughts: It's not about the price or how cool it is. First things first, it is a nifty achievement that 'can haz' the potential. BUT is cheap hardware really the most important thing here? No. Here is why. It is not based on any pedagogical concept at all. Anything targeted at the students in primary schools must be based on some kind of sound pedagogical framework. From software to the user experience. Slapping a stock Andriod OS on a cheap tablet is not going to solve the problems of the primary school system in India. Prerecorded video lectures can never work for school classrooms where teacher-student interactivity is indispensable. Let's stop singing praises of our "Great" "Innovation" for a moment and really think about it for a second. Do primary students really want to listen to someone blabbing on for an hour through a video? NO. It does not work like that. If it worked like that, best schools would have replaced their teachers with tubes and boomboxes. Where is the content delivery infrastructure? I run a small web application development company in the heart of a capital city of a state and heck, internet connectivity gives us headaches every once in a while. You can imagine the scenario in the remotest parts of the country. And how much does internet cost here - $100 for a 4Mbps connection with 35GB/month data limit and it is the home plan not the commercial plan. With so much costly connectivity and abysmal infrastructure, how will the content be delivered. Involved costs are exorbitant. As others have already pointed out, the costs involved are not a trivial amount. Not only the tablet but the delivery network and other necessary infrastructure. Can the state governments bear the such costs. No. Technology is nice; Its not the silver bullet. Let me say this once for all. 99% of Indian school(or college level) teachers are bullshit. They don't know anything about teaching or the subject matter they are "teaching". I did not know this when I went to school. But now I am 28 and I have 9 cousins between the age 7 - 16 in some of the top schools in my city. And what their teachers teach them is bullshit. Example: I found out one of my 5th grade cousin does not know what a number line is. Despite being a part of his maths curriculum, the teacher just skipped over it. So, advice to the government and education departments: FIX THE DAMN SCHOOL FIRST. Finally look at what Indian teachers are teaching in schools http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FViBJg6X_24 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FViBJg6X_24 even if you do not understand Hindi you will still pick a lot of things. There are bigger problems than "lack of a cheap tablet". Children are dying because of malnutrition. Farmers are committing suicides. What Indian government does not want anyone to know is that: - 65 tribal children died of malnutrition in the state of Madhya Pradesh. - 125 farmers committed suicide because huge debts in Deccan states. - Indian security forces butchered 110 peaceful protesters in Kashmir. during the same period when India was busy spending 150 million USD on Commonwealth games. http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying-of-malnutrition-in-tribal-india http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying... Finally, in my very very humble and personal opinion, all this tablet is ever going to achieve is become another toy in the closets of children from middle to upper middle class families. PS: Does anyone recall India's own custom built, secure OS? Anyone?
abhaga 15y ago
I don't understand. The $49 price point has been achieved under govt subsidy. How is that a technology innovation? They can subsidize it down to any price they want. Wasn't the deal to actually develop a tablet which costs $35 to build/sale?
keithnoizu 15y ago
In all fairness how much do the ipad components actually cost.
- keithnoizu 15y ago
  Nice down vote. I'm serious how impressive is a 35$ tablet? The core component cost on a lot of the technology we use is fairly low most of the expense is in R&D and advertising. Things like 64gb flash drives and so forth can be priced out in bulk for around 12-13 dollars a unit.
keeptrying 15y ago
As the Hole-In-The-Wall experiment showed even slum children with no education figured out how to use the internet and learn from it. http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm So I think the kids will figure out how to use it well and learn from it as long as we can get into their hands. The language issue is not a huge problem in my view. Because at the very least the kids will learn english using this thing. Also you could preload links to youtube videos showing lectures in the kids's mother tongue. I wish this thing had a 3g connectivity as that is available in a lot of rural places in India. Wifi is going to be tough in a village. My dad's village has water for 3 hours a day and electricity for about 20 hours a day but I've never seen the internet connectivity ever fail me.
antihero 15y ago
This looks awesome, could be so good in education. Need to make a software to quickly put CM7/something 2.3.4 based on it, mind. Anyone got a link to the specs?
namank 15y ago
It doesn't matter if all the kids do is play Tetris on it all day. Most of them will. Thats how they learn, thats how they will pick up the technology. Then the curious ones will try to download more games for it and in the process figure out that Android is open source and that they can make their own games for it. That is when the real purpose of these tablets comes into play. I remember I got my first computer in grade 2. All I did was play games. By grade 10, I was setting up my own http/ftp/email servers. Then I tried installing mac on windows. By grade 11, I knew everything that went inside the box. Now, I'm studying computer engineering. All kids need is support (infrastructure for education), they are already curious enough to take whatever it is you give them to the next level.
jterce 15y ago
...and by "ready to ship" they mean "not ready to ship, but might be by the end of the month."

111 points by namank 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ditojim 15y ago

Android FTW!

wccrawford 15y ago

Revised to $50, per the article. But still, at $50, it's quite a nice toy. And if it encourages -anyone- to read, it's doing a good thing.

raganwald 15y ago

To paraphrase a line from Stuart Brand's amazing book The Media Lab: "Hardware wants to be free."

rb2k_ 15y ago

I personally get really annoyed at those "will ship in x days" announcements. It's almost impossible to tell when those are marketing vs actual facts. I believe it when I can buy it on Amazon/eBay/... and it gets delivered within a week.

grannyg00se 15y ago
I agree. If it was "ready to ship" it would be shipping.

pitchups 15y ago

If it is even half as good as the video demo, it will be a huge success IMHO.

statictype 15y ago

Impressive. What corners had to be cut in order to keep the cost down to such a level.

martythemaniak 15y ago
Resistive screen for one - notice the stylus. Also, probably old hardware and little RAM. While the difference between this tablet and the Samsung Tab or iPad may be huge, the difference between no computer and this one is far far bigger.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- adamdecaf 15y ago
  In the video they mentioned "2gb" of ram.
- nrbafna 15y ago
  7" Resistive touch screen, 32GB hard disk, 2GB RAM, 2 USB ports, WiFi. http://techpp.com/2011/06/15/indias-low-cost-sakshat-tablet-launching-this-month-for-49/ http://techpp.com/2011/06/15/indias-low-cost-sakshat-tablet-...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Calamitous 15y ago
Looks like a resistive touchscreen (stylus required) as opposed to a capacitive one.
justanotheratom 15y ago
There is usually a lot of government subsidy involved in things like these.

Zakuzaa 15y ago

Assuming India has 250 Million students who could make use of such a device. If every one of them is given this tablet: 250 Million * $35 (will probably be even lesser when produced in such a massive quantity) = ~9 Billion USD Add distribution and other chores.. takes it to ~10 Billion USD. To add some perspective, India's infamous 2G scam is 5 times bigger than that. [Edit]: Costs could go even lower if the device is ad supported, like kindle.

joshu 15y ago
2g scam?
- nrbafna 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam

pitdesi 15y ago

http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indias_35_tablet_Sakshat_to_roll_out_this_month-nid-84825.html http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indias_35_tablet_Saksha... this article indicates that they will ship 10,000 units to IIT Rajasthan late this month, but 90k more units will be available over the next several months... but why? There are only a few hundred students there. I'll believe it when I see it.

sandGorgon 15y ago

Here comes the relevance from an earlier discussion of mine http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623722 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623722 - "Nobody in India uses computers in Indian languages". This tablet can revolutionize rural education, especially since the Indian govt mandates rural connectivity as a pre-requisite to handing out telecom wireless licenses. But you cannot teach village kids in English - especially, if in a few years they have to go and read the land records, inheritance documents, local newspapers which are in regional vernacular. But the system is running Android - guess what is the top request on the Android bug list? (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?sort=-stars http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?sort=-stars) Arabic language support. Same problem as Indic fonts. Same problem on all Linuxes.

lallysingh 15y ago
.. but Arabic isn't terribly huge in India. Hindi is. Edit: Ah, thanks for the clarification.
- jimbobimbo 15y ago
  OP: "Same problem as Indic fonts."
nrbafna 15y ago
Android 2.3 did bring in support for Hindi and Arabic. <http://www.talkandroid.com/22956-android-2-3-gingerbread-doubles-language-support-from-2-2-froyo/&#62 http://www.talkandroid.com/22956-android-2-3-gingerbread-dou...; Though, I doubt if the tablet would be able to run Gingerbread.
- sandGorgon 15y ago
  not sure if that is entirely true - this bug is still open http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1618 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1618 Again, if they still used a non-smartfont technology for compound scripts (I think that's what they call when two alphabets join together to form a new alphabet), it wont really solve the problem.

mortenjorck 15y ago

Hardware is the most obvious part of the equation, and it's amazing to see that part nearing solved. The less obvious, but no less important part, however, is software. What will these things run? Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio aren't going to help kids learn to read, build an understanding of the world around them, and ultimately create value in society. I'm sure you can come up with a handful of "educational" apps from the Android Marketplace, but for these to really be valuable in schools, they're going to need professionally-developed, curriculum-integrated software, and teachers are going to need to be trained in using it to its potential. Having a $50/$35/$10 tablet sets the stage for great things, but that's all it does. It enables real advances in education, but it won't make those advances by itself.

nrbafna 15y ago
A major problem with education in rural India is the lack of (qualified) regular teachers. So, _if_ we could provide decent internet access, it will open them up to good resources on the internet, like Khan Academy. Though, it is only natural for us to be skeptic, it may well be worth a try.
Steko 15y ago
"Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio aren't going to help kids learn to read" Straw man alert. It should be incredibly obvious that the tablets will have etexts, note taking, html lessons and quizzes, flash cards, etc. In short all the things kids do to learn 100 or 50 or 20 years ago but with the efficiency of a converged device.
code_duck 15y ago
>What will these things run? Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio [...] Why focus on apps? What they will run is a web browser. Being able to connect to the HTML/Web platform is more important than the OS. Of course a single hardware device does not solve all of the issues in education. While a browser is not educational software in itself, any internet connected device with a browser has great potential to do the things you list. If nothing else, they can connect to Wikipedia in 100 languages.

jim_h 15y ago

It's hard to tell how the performance will be. In the video any actual footage of the device in use was sped up. As others have said, I'll believe it when I see it.

jerf 15y ago
In a way, the real question isn't "How do apps written for more powerful devices perform?", but "How will apps written specifically for this device perform?" Is the hardware merely underpower relative to current Android apps, or is the device fundamentally full of large amounts of latency in many subsystems?

r00fus 15y ago

Ok, so what happened to the simputer? Apparently the project is considered a failure after releasing only thousands of the devices. Tack onto that the failure of XO/OLPC, and you have all these successive efforts to get cheap computing devices in the hands of children, hoping like magic, the device will herald a transformation of education in rural villages. Will an android tablet succeed where the others failed? Unless we know why the other projects failed, I don't see why this one would succeed.

TruthElixirX 15y ago
How did XO/OLPC fail? I'm curious, I quit following the project. I thought it just never really got off the ground. Was that the only failure or something different?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

walexander 15y ago

I wonder what this means for the OLPC tablet? $35-50 to equip kids with this thing at two to three times the volume of a $100+ XO3 (which to this point is vaporware apparently, I can only find concept art) seems like a good idea to me.

mnazim 15y ago

I live in India and here are my thoughts: It's not about the price or how cool it is. First things first, it is a nifty achievement that 'can haz' the potential. BUT is cheap hardware really the most important thing here? No. Here is why. It is not based on any pedagogical concept at all. Anything targeted at the students in primary schools must be based on some kind of sound pedagogical framework. From software to the user experience. Slapping a stock Andriod OS on a cheap tablet is not going to solve the problems of the primary school system in India. Prerecorded video lectures can never work for school classrooms where teacher-student interactivity is indispensable. Let's stop singing praises of our "Great" "Innovation" for a moment and really think about it for a second. Do primary students really want to listen to someone blabbing on for an hour through a video? NO. It does not work like that. If it worked like that, best schools would have replaced their teachers with tubes and boomboxes. Where is the content delivery infrastructure? I run a small web application development company in the heart of a capital city of a state and heck, internet connectivity gives us headaches every once in a while. You can imagine the scenario in the remotest parts of the country. And how much does internet cost here - $100 for a 4Mbps connection with 35GB/month data limit and it is the home plan not the commercial plan. With so much costly connectivity and abysmal infrastructure, how will the content be delivered. Involved costs are exorbitant. As others have already pointed out, the costs involved are not a trivial amount. Not only the tablet but the delivery network and other necessary infrastructure. Can the state governments bear the such costs. No. Technology is nice; Its not the silver bullet. Let me say this once for all. 99% of Indian school(or college level) teachers are bullshit. They don't know anything about teaching or the subject matter they are "teaching". I did not know this when I went to school. But now I am 28 and I have 9 cousins between the age 7 - 16 in some of the top schools in my city. And what their teachers teach them is bullshit. Example: I found out one of my 5th grade cousin does not know what a number line is. Despite being a part of his maths curriculum, the teacher just skipped over it. So, advice to the government and education departments: FIX THE DAMN SCHOOL FIRST. Finally look at what Indian teachers are teaching in schools http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FViBJg6X_24 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FViBJg6X_24 even if you do not understand Hindi you will still pick a lot of things. There are bigger problems than "lack of a cheap tablet". Children are dying because of malnutrition. Farmers are committing suicides. What Indian government does not want anyone to know is that: - 65 tribal children died of malnutrition in the state of Madhya Pradesh. - 125 farmers committed suicide because huge debts in Deccan states. - Indian security forces butchered 110 peaceful protesters in Kashmir. during the same period when India was busy spending 150 million USD on Commonwealth games. http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying-of-malnutrition-in-tribal-india http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying... Finally, in my very very humble and personal opinion, all this tablet is ever going to achieve is become another toy in the closets of children from middle to upper middle class families. PS: Does anyone recall India's own custom built, secure OS? Anyone?

abhaga 15y ago

I don't understand. The $49 price point has been achieved under govt subsidy. How is that a technology innovation? They can subsidize it down to any price they want. Wasn't the deal to actually develop a tablet which costs $35 to build/sale?

keithnoizu 15y ago

In all fairness how much do the ipad components actually cost.

keithnoizu 15y ago
Nice down vote. I'm serious how impressive is a 35$ tablet? The core component cost on a lot of the technology we use is fairly low most of the expense is in R&D and advertising. Things like 64gb flash drives and so forth can be priced out in bulk for around 12-13 dollars a unit.

keeptrying 15y ago

As the Hole-In-The-Wall experiment showed even slum children with no education figured out how to use the internet and learn from it. http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm So I think the kids will figure out how to use it well and learn from it as long as we can get into their hands. The language issue is not a huge problem in my view. Because at the very least the kids will learn english using this thing. Also you could preload links to youtube videos showing lectures in the kids's mother tongue. I wish this thing had a 3g connectivity as that is available in a lot of rural places in India. Wifi is going to be tough in a village. My dad's village has water for 3 hours a day and electricity for about 20 hours a day but I've never seen the internet connectivity ever fail me.

antihero 15y ago

This looks awesome, could be so good in education. Need to make a software to quickly put CM7/something 2.3.4 based on it, mind. Anyone got a link to the specs?

namank 15y ago

It doesn't matter if all the kids do is play Tetris on it all day. Most of them will. Thats how they learn, thats how they will pick up the technology. Then the curious ones will try to download more games for it and in the process figure out that Android is open source and that they can make their own games for it. That is when the real purpose of these tablets comes into play. I remember I got my first computer in grade 2. All I did was play games. By grade 10, I was setting up my own http/ftp/email servers. Then I tried installing mac on windows. By grade 11, I knew everything that went inside the box. Now, I'm studying computer engineering. All kids need is support (infrastructure for education), they are already curious enough to take whatever it is you give them to the next level.

jterce 15y ago

...and by "ready to ship" they mean "not ready to ship, but might be by the end of the month."