4 ms·

The specs on that Xiaomi are really nice value. I'd been looking at the 2nd gen Moto E or G for my parents, but the Xiaomi beats it, although at a higher cost.

The specs on that Xiaomi are really nice value. I'd been looking at the 2nd gen Moto E or G for my parents, but the Xiaomi beats it, although at a higher cost. It just amazes me how cheap tech has become. The other day I was looking through the Microsoft Store, saw a $90 ish tablet that had various discounts at times bringing it down to an absolutely ridiculous $60-70 range. I checked out some reviews and they were glowing (in terms of value), it actually runs windows 8 and comes with a year of Office 365 and an hour of Skype minutes every month. I can hardly imagine anyone buying Office 365 for a year at $70, instead of just buying this tablet instead haha. Of course it's no Mac Pro, but it surprised me. HP stream 7 was the name. I just sat there grinning while watching the reviews on this device, computing is truly becoming completely and totally ubiquitous this decade, even consumer computing is becoming a cheap commodity.

leaveyou 12y ago
I was in the same position: Moto G or something similar.. but lots of reviewers complained about battery life.. And then I saw the price and specs of xiaomi note: 2Gb RAM, 3100mAh and 5.5"+good resolution. If nothing else more interesting appears in the next weeks, I'm gonna buy a second one for my wife.
untog 12y ago
Just looked it up. Currently $79, with a $25 Windows Store voucher and $69-worth of Office 365. Extremely tempted but I really need to stop buying random tablet-y devices I'll never use.
- vram22 12y ago
  Hehe, that really is a temptation. I wish there was one all-purpose device (maybe modular, like the earlier Modu phone [1] and now Google's Project Ara (still to come). [1] Read about Modu in TechCrunch some years ago. An Israeli startup backed by Yossi Vardi, IIRC. Not sure what happened to it. But the idea seemed promising.
SloopJon 12y ago
Second-gen Moto E came out just as my wife's Nexus 4 was giving up the ghost, and so far it is the perfect replacement. She was a little upset that it cost so much ($150), at which point I thought it unwise to remind her how much our iPods have cost over the years.
mahyarm 12y ago
So I got one of those stream 7 tablets. I like it when I use it as a device, but windows 8 isn't quite ready for a tablet os I feel like. I was wanting a keyboard & trackpad pretty quickly. By adding a keyboard case, I might as well use a netbook anyway at this weight profile. Also tapping on some things can be awkward. Also the battery dies on you quickly on idle, and it doesn't charge that easily through usb, you need a really high power charger for the charging indicator to turn on.
- vram22 12y ago
  > I might as well use a netbook anyway Are netbooks still being produced in mass scale? I was considering buying a netbook recently, as a 2nd lighter machine than my laptop, so that I can take it when I go out to nearby places like for shops / malls, and use short spells of free time outside to do some work (at least work that's light on CPU/RAM resources, like Python programming, or even email or technical topic browsing). But a few computer shops I went to, told me that Asus / Acer (for example) are not making new ones these days. This is in India, BTW. Don't know if this issue (if real) is specific to this region or not.
  - mahyarm 12y ago
    By netbook I meant more those really cheap "11 laptops that cost about $200 and quickly get performance issues in a year. The HP stream 11 is one example. Or a chromebook.
andrepd 12y ago
Wasn't personal computing ubiquitous for two decades now?
- IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  Sort of, but also not really. Two decades ago, say around 1995, a computer was still pretty damn expensive. A decent system (not high-end systems like we use for gaming today, but very basic office stuff) would easily set you back $1k to $2k, which is a bit more in today's dollars. That wasn't accessible to everyone, especially because these things weren't good enough to replace your office, your phone, your TV, your gaming console, your newspaper, your camera etc. So it was an additional cost to all of that. And while it was already large two decades ago, it's not ubiquitous in the sense of finding $70 star trek like tablets in remote villages in central Africa, like happens today. Ubiquitous in the sense that outside of the 10-20% upper-middle class of the US/Europe, who've indeed had personal computing for decades, we're seeing computing arrive en masse to an additional 1-2 billion people, and probably billions more not long after, now that you get full desktop software, with complete hardware including input and a screen and battery, at $70 retail, and sub $50 second hand. That's insane. You guys remember the $20 smartphone media talk last year? Should have arrived by now. In any case, this decade is something special. Chips are using so little energy nowadays, low res screens, too. Things are sturdy, cheap. The electricity costs per year are a tiny fraction of the device's costs (which is on its way to 5 to 10c a day per device) Computing is actually going to become accessible to 4-5 billion people by the end of the decade, that's something really new. And we're seeing a lot of initiatives in terms of free, global-coverage connectivity in the form of internet, too, for low-data applications like messaging, banking, wikipedia etc. e.g. FB & Google's initiatives.

leaveyou 12y ago

I was in the same position: Moto G or something similar.. but lots of reviewers complained about battery life.. And then I saw the price and specs of xiaomi note: 2Gb RAM, 3100mAh and 5.5"+good resolution. If nothing else more interesting appears in the next weeks, I'm gonna buy a second one for my wife.

untog 12y ago

Just looked it up. Currently $79, with a $25 Windows Store voucher and $69-worth of Office 365. Extremely tempted but I really need to stop buying random tablet-y devices I'll never use.

vram22 12y ago
Hehe, that really is a temptation. I wish there was one all-purpose device (maybe modular, like the earlier Modu phone [1] and now Google's Project Ara (still to come). [1] Read about Modu in TechCrunch some years ago. An Israeli startup backed by Yossi Vardi, IIRC. Not sure what happened to it. But the idea seemed promising.

SloopJon 12y ago

Second-gen Moto E came out just as my wife's Nexus 4 was giving up the ghost, and so far it is the perfect replacement. She was a little upset that it cost so much ($150), at which point I thought it unwise to remind her how much our iPods have cost over the years.

mahyarm 12y ago

So I got one of those stream 7 tablets. I like it when I use it as a device, but windows 8 isn't quite ready for a tablet os I feel like. I was wanting a keyboard & trackpad pretty quickly. By adding a keyboard case, I might as well use a netbook anyway at this weight profile. Also tapping on some things can be awkward. Also the battery dies on you quickly on idle, and it doesn't charge that easily through usb, you need a really high power charger for the charging indicator to turn on.

vram22 12y ago
> I might as well use a netbook anyway Are netbooks still being produced in mass scale? I was considering buying a netbook recently, as a 2nd lighter machine than my laptop, so that I can take it when I go out to nearby places like for shops / malls, and use short spells of free time outside to do some work (at least work that's light on CPU/RAM resources, like Python programming, or even email or technical topic browsing). But a few computer shops I went to, told me that Asus / Acer (for example) are not making new ones these days. This is in India, BTW. Don't know if this issue (if real) is specific to this region or not.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  By netbook I meant more those really cheap "11 laptops that cost about $200 and quickly get performance issues in a year. The HP stream 11 is one example. Or a chromebook.

andrepd 12y ago

Wasn't personal computing ubiquitous for two decades now?

IkmoIkmo 12y ago
Sort of, but also not really. Two decades ago, say around 1995, a computer was still pretty damn expensive. A decent system (not high-end systems like we use for gaming today, but very basic office stuff) would easily set you back $1k to $2k, which is a bit more in today's dollars. That wasn't accessible to everyone, especially because these things weren't good enough to replace your office, your phone, your TV, your gaming console, your newspaper, your camera etc. So it was an additional cost to all of that. And while it was already large two decades ago, it's not ubiquitous in the sense of finding $70 star trek like tablets in remote villages in central Africa, like happens today. Ubiquitous in the sense that outside of the 10-20% upper-middle class of the US/Europe, who've indeed had personal computing for decades, we're seeing computing arrive en masse to an additional 1-2 billion people, and probably billions more not long after, now that you get full desktop software, with complete hardware including input and a screen and battery, at $70 retail, and sub $50 second hand. That's insane. You guys remember the $20 smartphone media talk last year? Should have arrived by now. In any case, this decade is something special. Chips are using so little energy nowadays, low res screens, too. Things are sturdy, cheap. The electricity costs per year are a tiny fraction of the device's costs (which is on its way to 5 to 10c a day per device) Computing is actually going to become accessible to 4-5 billion people by the end of the decade, that's something really new. And we're seeing a lot of initiatives in terms of free, global-coverage connectivity in the form of internet, too, for low-data applications like messaging, banking, wikipedia etc. e.g. FB & Google's initiatives.