

India's $35 tablet ready to ship - namank
http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/06/17/india-35-tablet/

======
mnazim
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> 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...](http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying-of-
malnutrition-in-tribal-india)

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?

~~~
madtantric
Cheap tablet with network connectivity will help self motivated students to
learn by themselves. I hope that access to the Internet will get rid of the
incompetent teachers from their path to knowledge. Some states have taken
concrete measures to get rural India connected to the Internet. Yes, there is
corruption,poverty,education,health and whole lot of other problems that India
needs to solve. They need not be solved in sequential order. Bringing in the
politics related to Kashmir is irrelevant to this topic. Since you mentioned
it, I would like to bring in another perspective. The protesters were seen as
violent anti-nationals by one group and as peaceful freedom fighters by
others. Unfortunately for India, the grouping was based, to a large extent, on
whether one was a Hindu or a Muslim.

~~~
mnazim
Disagree strongly. Take 10 year old boy or a girl, give him the cheap tablet
and unlimited internet supply and now read your statement again.

"Cheap tablet with network connectivity will help self motivated students to
learn by themselves"

and answer this. What is the meaning of self motivation for a 10 year old?

~~~
kristiandupont
What do you mean? Motivation comes from curiosity and a 10 year old has that
more than most! Give him an internet connection and he can learn almost
anything!

~~~
mnazim
Agreed motivation comes from curiosity. But in case of 10 year old with all
the distractions on the internet, can he/she or will he/she really spend
enough time on Khan Academy to learn maths, science, language etc. on his own?

~~~
sudhirc
If that is the case then you should be force feeding the child to become
something they never wanted to be. Children coming from poor families will
focus their energies on learning especially when will head from likes of Bill
Gates that khan academy is all you need to learn something.They will atleast
get started and go for it. Sugata mitra is experiment[1] clearly demonstrate
what childrens can do once they are left to their own devices.

Problem with children is not the desire to learn, problem is bad teachers who
does nothing but inhibit and curb their student's creativity.

[1]
[http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_t...](http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html)

~~~
mnazim
Dear sudhirc. Please read my comments. I am constantly mentioning "primary
school education".

I don't give a damn about careers, I don't give a damn about degrees; because
by the time people are in (senior)high school, they are smart to use the 3
pound coconut God put on their shoulders and figure things out for themselves.

All I care about primary school education. And children NEED hand holding and
general direction providing at such a nascent level which can only be provided
by a trained teacher within a pedagogically sound system and can never be
achieved by any level of technologically marvelous device of any sorts.
Period.

That is why when I have children they are not going to school until they are
at least 10 years old. :P

PS: I don't care what Bill Gates says. Since when is he an authority on
education? What are his credentials/contributions in the field?

------
sandGorgon
Here comes the relevance from an earlier discussion of mine
<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>)
Arabic language support.

Same problem as Indic fonts. Same problem on all Linuxes.

~~~
nrbafna
Android 2.3 did bring in support for _Hindi_ and Arabic.
<[http://www.talkandroid.com/22956-android-2-3-gingerbread-
dou...](http://www.talkandroid.com/22956-android-2-3-gingerbread-doubles-
language-support-from-2-2-froyo/>);

Though, I doubt if the tablet would be able to run Gingerbread.

~~~
sandGorgon
not sure if that is entirely true - this bug is still open
<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.

~~~
zem
they could simply use a glyph to indicate that this letter and the next are to
be joined. not the prettiest, but eminently usable.

------
rb2k_
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
I agree. If it was "ready to ship" it would be shipping.

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keeptrying
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>

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.

------
mortenjorck
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.

~~~
Steko
"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.

------
wccrawford
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.

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abhaga
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?

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r00fus
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
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?

------
Zakuzaa
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
2g scam?

~~~
nrbafna
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam>

------
namank
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.

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

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jim_h
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
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?

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

~~~
martythemaniak
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.

~~~
nrbafna
7" Resistive touch screen, 32GB hard disk, 2GB RAM, 2 USB ports, WiFi.

[http://techpp.com/2011/06/15/indias-low-cost-sakshat-
tablet-...](http://techpp.com/2011/06/15/indias-low-cost-sakshat-tablet-
launching-this-month-for-49/)

------
antihero
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?

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

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

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

~~~
keithnoizu
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.

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pitdesi
[http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indias_35_tablet_Saksha...](http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indias_35_tablet_Sakshat_to_roll_out_this_month-
nid-84825.html) 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.

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ditojim
Android FTW!

