$50 is absolutely insane. Still very excited about the thought of getting these devices to places like rural India, combined with things like Khan Academy Lite [0]
I don't want to be too optimistic about some inevitable miracle once you supply hardware and content, but in general these price levels are indications for what we can expect by 2020. Dirt cheap, ubiquitous devices capable of handling virtually all computing tasks you'd like say a 14 year old to do, with a rich second-hand market of devices pushing the price even lower.
And the energy requirements are ridiculously low. We've seen the latest iPads around 30 watthours, that's about 0.3 cents for a full (10 hour) charge at typical retail electricity prices, and this fire tablet looks to be about 1/3rd the battery size but more than 2/3rd the battery life, we're probably looking at about 0.015 cents ($0.00015) per hour of use. Tiny solar installations can be sufficient for this level of energy use. I'm hoping global, low-bandwidth internet that some have proposed in various forms (e.g. Google, FB) will not trail behind much.
I mean really, let's think about it. It's a quad core device with 1 gig of ram and gigabytes of storage (and SD-capable), with a screen, 7 hour battery, keyboard, speaker and connectivity... and with say a 3 year lifetime, it costs you 4 cents per day. In a few years, this level of tech becomes accessible to virtually everyone. We all expected it to happen of course, but still, think back to 2010 when the iPad was introduced at 10x the price ($500+), with a quarter the ram, a lower resolution and slower cpu. Yes it's subsidised a bit by the fact it tries to drive Amazon sales after purchase, but still. Who knows where we'll be in another five years.
I'm the CTO of an organization that has been delivering cheap tablets with educational content to rural areas for several years: http://www.rumie.org/
Some of the challenges:
1) Making sure the tablets actually make it to the people that need them and aren't repurposed/resold
2) Lack of internet so all content and apps need to be offline-friendly
3) Loading the tablets with content appropriate to the region (language, cultural)
I'm not sure if you include (or want to include) a maps-like app on your tablet. If you do, you've probably looked at this already, but just in case you haven't, have you looked at the OpenStreetMap project? You can preload mapping data on the device and oyu have your own choice in what data to include.
It's not even particularly cheap for a low end tablet. You can get similar spec'ed devices for down to <$40 at Aliexpress. $40-$45 tends to give you versions with twice the flash storage.
Pretty much all of the lowest end tablets tend to be almost identical designs based on minor tweaks on off the shelf designs from MTK and AllWinner anyway (and most use the same small set of plastic shell designs).
True. But you can pick up pretty much identical tablets (my guess is down to the PCB level, as it does not look like Amazon has done much custom design here) at AliExpress cheaper than that, and if you look around a bit or ask, finding ones that either come pre-rooted or where the vendor is happy to do it for you or point you in the right direction is easy.
This is where these cheap tablets really shine - they come from distributors that generally really don't care. On the other hand this is also the downside: They also really don't care about updates etc..
The biggest downside, I think, is the state of open drivers for the GPU's on these ARM devices.
Not sure what you mean by locked down. The amazon app store has a fair number of apps in it and it has always been possible to sideload apps from external sources, even sideloading google app services and play store (at least in the fire phone and previous gen fire tablet, not certain about the new one). I don't think it's any more locked down than Google Android or iOS.
It this context, I presume it would mean can't reflash firmware or modify aspects of the firmware. For example, on some devices you have full control so you can modify and replace everything from the bootloader to application level software. For example, maybe you would rather run debian on this device rather than android-fire.
On one hand I agree: yes things like this are a step into what is common tech for us in the hands of people all over the world. On the other hand I sometimes have serious doubts about whether it is really needed to push our consumption society into these countries where there are often still problems with basics like clean water/hygiene/electricity/birth control/housing/western influenced dirty industries/...
Oh don't get me wrong, I don't look at cheap computing as trying to push a 'consumption society' of watching Netflix in a village in India. I referred to the Khan Academy (lite, low bandwidth version) for example. I look at these things really as a way to emancipate and empower. I can't imagine where I'd be without the internet, how many things I have taught myself over the years, questions I have been able to answer I wouldn't know who to ask, or even dare to ask if I did. And currently I'm relearning my highschool math and beyond for free, after a decade of never touching calculus in real life and forgetting everything about it. If I'd have to choose between giving up things like google or hell, HN vs Netflix/FB/Amazon, I'd give up the latter in a heartbeat. And that's really the hope I have for cheap ubiquitous access to computing. I see these devices within the spectrum of education and empowerment first and foremost, things that can help solve the issues you mentioned.
Anyway I fully agree with you, there are other priorities. Clean water, electricity, birth control etc. But that's so exciting about cheap tech. At $50 over 3 years of lifetime, you're paying 4 cents a day, for a device that looks to have slightly better specs than the $500 iPad 2 of just 4 years ago. Imagine where the price goes in a few more years, to 2 or 3 cents? And then consider you may share it with one other person, or multiple in a classroom, and buy it secondhand or in bulk (e.g. the fire tablet itself costs just ~$41 rather than $50 if you buy 6 of them at once.) We might be looking at a cost of computing of 1-2 cents a day, that's not insignificant if you earn $1 or $2 a day, but it's getting so cheap that it's no longer a big tradeoff between this and say electricity. Soon you can meaningfully have both.
Televisions cost several months wages when they came out in the US the 1950s. Yet most families acquired them. The installment system- weekly, monthly- was the way of buying expensive appliances before credit cards became common. I belive TVs spread around the wotld in a similar fashion. Now tablets.
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?
The people who are going to load up on electronics first will be the relatively-wealthiest in the area, which generally means commerce gets the first dibs, not students.
Still, cause for astonishment is valid. There's plenty that can be done even with simple news, price checks, and email functions. For most of the undeveloped world that has meant a basic featurephone until recently - but who knows what's going to happen next?
I don't want to be too optimistic about some inevitable miracle once you supply hardware and content, but in general these price levels are indications for what we can expect by 2020. Dirt cheap, ubiquitous devices capable of handling virtually all computing tasks you'd like say a 14 year old to do, with a rich second-hand market of devices pushing the price even lower.
And the energy requirements are ridiculously low. We've seen the latest iPads around 30 watthours, that's about 0.3 cents for a full (10 hour) charge at typical retail electricity prices, and this fire tablet looks to be about 1/3rd the battery size but more than 2/3rd the battery life, we're probably looking at about 0.015 cents ($0.00015) per hour of use. Tiny solar installations can be sufficient for this level of energy use. I'm hoping global, low-bandwidth internet that some have proposed in various forms (e.g. Google, FB) will not trail behind much.
I mean really, let's think about it. It's a quad core device with 1 gig of ram and gigabytes of storage (and SD-capable), with a screen, 7 hour battery, keyboard, speaker and connectivity... and with say a 3 year lifetime, it costs you 4 cents per day. In a few years, this level of tech becomes accessible to virtually everyone. We all expected it to happen of course, but still, think back to 2010 when the iPad was introduced at 10x the price ($500+), with a quarter the ram, a lower resolution and slower cpu. Yes it's subsidised a bit by the fact it tries to drive Amazon sales after purchase, but still. Who knows where we'll be in another five years.
[0] https://learningequality.org/ka-lite/