I understand that, but let's be optimistic here for a second.
1) I already showed the price of this device over 3 years is 4 cents a day. Yes that's significant if you have just $1 or $2 a day to spend, but a $50 price level is a broad indication these devices will come into reach very rapidly. That 4 cent will drop to 3 or even 2 cents in the next few years, a second-hand market will push prices of the tech even lower. Then consider one can share these devices among a small number of people (say 4 kids in a small local school), and you're dropping the per-person costs down to a cent or a fraction of a cent per day, doable even if you live on $1-2.
2) illiteracy I think is sometimes overestimated. For adults it's around 75% in India, more likely than not your customer will be literate. More importantly perhaps, literacy for children sits around 90% and shows signs of improving. Tablets can help with learning, and the economics of supplying 1.000 pages of annual reading material to every student with a few devices in the classroom, compared to doing the same with books, isn't that bad and starts to become good.
3) electricity is a huge problem, but not the biggest deal in the world for battery-based devices like tablets because 95% of villages in India are electrified and you can find a source of energy if you need it in most places, say a school or hospital. Homes are a different story although here too electrification is happening at a pace I'm pretty optimistic about. Sure, about 70-80 million have no access to electricity in India, but the remainder is more than a billion who do. But again, small solar installations can be sufficient, these batteries are maybe 10 watt hours large. You can buy solar at about $2 per watt for full installation, in India it's probably a bit more expensive but (solar has a large percentage of soft costs) other things will be cheaper. What's known though is that solar lamps are being sold all over India, parts of Africa etc, which run on solar, can get about 10 to 15 watt hours or so per day (enough to charge the fire tablet's 7 hour battery completely and then some), have a battery and USB chargers built into them and cost a fraction of the tablet. And solar in India is very rapidly becoming popular btw, you've got al lot of mini grids powered by one medium sized solar installation that get some state subsidies and they usually provide about 6-7 hours of electricity to the tune of 20-30 watt per household, for 25-35 thousand households at once, the household cost is 50 cents per month. Another issue that is tricky, but that can be overcome without having to pay $300 to hook up your home to the grid.
Wifi/internet connectivity is probably the slowest to arrive, but not necessarily the biggest issue. There's exciting solutions up ahead but very little is actually deployed so I remain skeptical about the timeframe we'll see this pick up. But even then, with gigabytes of on-device storage there's a ton of content you can make available to a kid with a single download, say once every 6 months to drop a bunch of books and educational software onto the device, the rest can be offline. If you can provide some connectivity somewhere within some miles of each person once a year, you can do a lot if you could push the price of content packages down (which can be done at a large scale). Continuous connectivity is great but not a complete necessity or deal breaker.
Finally I don't think the fire tablet will be the device to do it, not at all, it's very much a US customer device with a subsidising business model that probably doesn't work well outside the US. I'm simply looking at it as a price point for solid, reliable tech in 2015, and thinking ahead what could follow over the coming years.
Not the person you were replying to, but I have been to rural India. The way you asked that implies you think that what he said is inaccurate and/or naive. Is that correct?
1) I already showed the price of this device over 3 years is 4 cents a day. Yes that's significant if you have just $1 or $2 a day to spend, but a $50 price level is a broad indication these devices will come into reach very rapidly. That 4 cent will drop to 3 or even 2 cents in the next few years, a second-hand market will push prices of the tech even lower. Then consider one can share these devices among a small number of people (say 4 kids in a small local school), and you're dropping the per-person costs down to a cent or a fraction of a cent per day, doable even if you live on $1-2.
2) illiteracy I think is sometimes overestimated. For adults it's around 75% in India, more likely than not your customer will be literate. More importantly perhaps, literacy for children sits around 90% and shows signs of improving. Tablets can help with learning, and the economics of supplying 1.000 pages of annual reading material to every student with a few devices in the classroom, compared to doing the same with books, isn't that bad and starts to become good.
3) electricity is a huge problem, but not the biggest deal in the world for battery-based devices like tablets because 95% of villages in India are electrified and you can find a source of energy if you need it in most places, say a school or hospital. Homes are a different story although here too electrification is happening at a pace I'm pretty optimistic about. Sure, about 70-80 million have no access to electricity in India, but the remainder is more than a billion who do. But again, small solar installations can be sufficient, these batteries are maybe 10 watt hours large. You can buy solar at about $2 per watt for full installation, in India it's probably a bit more expensive but (solar has a large percentage of soft costs) other things will be cheaper. What's known though is that solar lamps are being sold all over India, parts of Africa etc, which run on solar, can get about 10 to 15 watt hours or so per day (enough to charge the fire tablet's 7 hour battery completely and then some), have a battery and USB chargers built into them and cost a fraction of the tablet. And solar in India is very rapidly becoming popular btw, you've got al lot of mini grids powered by one medium sized solar installation that get some state subsidies and they usually provide about 6-7 hours of electricity to the tune of 20-30 watt per household, for 25-35 thousand households at once, the household cost is 50 cents per month. Another issue that is tricky, but that can be overcome without having to pay $300 to hook up your home to the grid.
Wifi/internet connectivity is probably the slowest to arrive, but not necessarily the biggest issue. There's exciting solutions up ahead but very little is actually deployed so I remain skeptical about the timeframe we'll see this pick up. But even then, with gigabytes of on-device storage there's a ton of content you can make available to a kid with a single download, say once every 6 months to drop a bunch of books and educational software onto the device, the rest can be offline. If you can provide some connectivity somewhere within some miles of each person once a year, you can do a lot if you could push the price of content packages down (which can be done at a large scale). Continuous connectivity is great but not a complete necessity or deal breaker.
Finally I don't think the fire tablet will be the device to do it, not at all, it's very much a US customer device with a subsidising business model that probably doesn't work well outside the US. I'm simply looking at it as a price point for solid, reliable tech in 2015, and thinking ahead what could follow over the coming years.