Not to discourage you guys, but, this tablet is horrible. I am a class X Indian student, just got this for 2300 from the government outlet at Delhi. Its too slow. The battery only lasts an hour or so even if it's plugged in for 5 hours.
YouTube, is also way too bad.
Wifi connectivity is messed up. To switch to a new network, you have to restart the device.
It feels a bit cheap on the outside too and neither my USB Keyboard nor my external Hard disk was compatible.
I'll give it a rating of 3 out of 6.
It's basically slow with its 300mhz processor. You can easily get 600mhz tabs at 38$ directly from the Chinese factories.
But, there is one good thing about this, which is the GPRS capability. It also comes with 100 mb free data per month plan.
This device is not meant for someone like you to even evaluate. It is not meant to be used by people who hang out on hacker news or for people who grew up in Delhi and who travel in a/c Delhi metro. It is for poor kids in UP/Bihar who will never have any access to such technology otherwise. You have to see the bigger picture here.
I agree with kloc - you are not the target audience for this market. The reality is that the digital divide is still so real in India. The idea is to not give [underprivileged] children a toy product for watching YouTube videos, but to give them access to a device, a technology and a revolution that they otherwise would never even have dreamed to have access to. I for one applaud the Indian Govt's efforts to "democratize" access to technology. Also remember this is just a v1 - I'm sure as things get cheaper, better, faster etc. so will this device.
> It also comes with 100 mb free data per month plan.
If that's true then it is actually the real revolution here in my mind. For non-entertainment purposes a tablet is just a window onto the internet. It doesn't really matter how you get to the internet, but the minute you can your world expands a thousand fold. Suddenly giving millions (or tens or even hundreds of millions) of underprivileged people constant, always available internet access is a huge disruption.
That's true. I mean imagine for rural farmers how revolutionary it would be just to go on a weather website and be able to see that it's not supposed to frost within a couple days after they plant.
So, 3 years ago you'd have called it revolutionary.
Technology moves so fast these days that if you don't place the bar for your product sufficiently high you won't be able to get happy customers even if you give it away.
let those little ones play with the system, some of them will soon realize how much there is in the world outside and some of them will attempt to change the world!
its not about how fast it is or what all things are wrong in that. its about whatever is right in that - which indeed will be amazing for them.
Compared to the top-end devices currently available it is a mediocre device. But it have the potential to introduce technology to an impressive amount of people. I live in Brazil and three years ago I worked in an international team that included three indian programmers. Only one of them had a personal computer in his house. It is a completly different reality.
This device will allow people to lower the information differential between city dwellers and villagers, allowing them to negotiate better prices for their goods/services. This prototype is a great first step - let's see how users value the final version.
I know its $35 and all, but we have to contemplate the fact that it's running a 366 MHz processor, and that used be enough to do all sorts of things.
I look at this device and think of the many levels of failed abstractions this poor CPU chews through every time you tap the screen.
Something is terribly wrong here. Not with this device in particular. With our abstracting complexities to create more complexities; wasting cycles away. Sometimes I feel like throwing it all out the window and just making the machine do what I need.
Imagine what this would do to the PC sales in India? PC Sales were at 4.68 million in 2010 and it was expected to go up 22% in 2011. A significant chunk of those potential customers will opt for a far cheaper and mobile Aakash now. Ofcourse, there will still be some who will opt for a PC (as Aakash does not put a significant dent in their wallets), but the Tablet does it for a lot of people, with out having to worry about support, viruses etc.
Seeing as 4.68 million new PCs for a population of largely previously off-line 1.2b people is a very small drop in the bucket, I expect it will continue to go up rapidly very quickly for many years to come as India gets richer and PCs get cheaper.
I seriously think the Indian government is wasting money on this.
Funding projects like Rasberry Pi would have been much better. They don't even understand what a tablet is. It's a crippled device where all you can do is watch videos and browse the Internet on your couch. You can almost do nothing productive with the device.
Tablet is a rich man's device. Giving that to poor people is nonsensical.
In many countries such as India and throughout asia people have never used a landline. Think about this for a second. Everyone carries around cell phones because they simply leapfrogged the infrastructure requirement for land lines.
A tablet like this is certainly going to change things. How cheap are cell phones these days? I'm not talking about that fancy iPhone you have in your pocket. I am talking about how much it costs to go into MetroPCS and grab a phone off the shelf. Or possibly WalMart.
If you thought we were connected as a world before things are about to drastically change even more.
This could change your life if you can't get to a library and you can't afford a normal computer. Just being able to look up how to fix a car could restore mobility to someone who couldn't afford labor, or afford a tow to a mechanic.
That's one tiny example in a sea of little conveniences a computer affords us that we don't usually think about. And I'm not even talking about India. There are people in this situation in the US.
My first computer cost me just under a months wages (on special offer) as a recent graduate. Now we're looking at offering a computer with a similar performance to people on the official poverty line for just over a months wages ... seems like good progress.
Aside, I wonder how good these are at being repaired.
OLPC beat the mass popularization of mobile by a few years. The had to start with a non-stock (and more expensive) device because there weren't many parts that did what they wanted to do.
This tablet is probably what OLPC would look like if it started today.
The parts are pretty standard and the government can potentially buy them by million plus they can easily line up cheap manufacturing.
The OLPC was a unique and novel design with no real momentum behind it.
The main barrier to the success of this device is that since it's a government project at least 50% of the budget will be siphoned off into pork barrelling, ministerial pet projects and 'consultancy fees' to close friends and relatives of the politicians involved. Unless of course Indian politics is unlike any other variety.
It's $60 retail, there are $75 retail Chinese Android 2.3 tablets - they didn't change the world, why would this one?
Is the government going to create online courses in English and Hindi? Is it going to have English lessons so you can access all those 'educational' Youtube videos?
Is it going to record the best elementary school teachers and put their lessons online?
Or is it going to be another - "we put computers in schools and therefore solved all educational problems" just like the US did with the AppleII in the late 70s
The subsidized cost is $35, which makes it affordable to pretty much everyone who can afford a mobile phone. Obviously, this is not going to fix India's education problems. I'll go a step further and say that nothing anybody can do will fix all the educational problems in my country within, say, the next 15 years. Having said that, this seems a step in a right direction.
Defintely the tablet by itself means nothing. it needs content. And it can be said that even 20 years ago the indian government could have put a tv + VCR + great recorded content in every classroom for what is relatively a small sum. Just doing this would have improved the current Indian system by leaps and bounds.
But maybe the thing about the tablet is that once people have the tablet, the government isn't the only one who can improve education. Private entrepreneurs, non-profits and juts plain teachers could build great content, market it, etc.
Considering the awfull state of indian education and(my guess) that indian educators are much less entrenched than westren ones(i.e. powerfull unions), affordable private education could really hit big in india, and a tablet at every hand could really be the needed channel for it.
It is not just about courses in youtube. Quite a few courses are already available in the educational network in India. At present, only a small section of the students have access to these; that too, only at school. The main objective of the government is to provide means to access these courses.
This is nitpicking, but no middle-class family can afford to spend 2k on a night out in India. Hell, I was earning a boatload (relatively of course) of money, and I wasn't comfortable spending more than 1k or so on a night out.
Completely agree. Right now I am in US and earn in dollars and support my family back home, even then my dad would never spend 1700 rupees on a night out. Also, if someone can afford to spend that kind of money for a night out, I am very sure they can afford a higher quality tablet.
I think this is for someone like the maid who works at our home and makes around 3000 rupees a month. She can save money and buy this for her kid so that they are better educated.
Wait.. you're saying by working in US, you can support yourself here AND support your family back home including hiring a maid!? I wish I could work there with a global pay salary...
> Wait.. you're saying by working in US, you can support yourself here AND support your family back home
Considering that 1 USD is 49.5 INR, why does this come as a surprise to you? For context, 1000 USD will be around 49000 INR at current conversion(it will be less but for argument's sake) which is more than what a software engineer with 3 years of experience makes in a month.
> including hiring a maid!?
I pay my maid 800 INR to do my dishes and clean the house. Manual labor in India is dirt cheap.
> I wish I could work there with a global pay salary...
It's easy. Find a contract job in the US which allows you to work remotely from outside the US, move to a country where the currency conversion makes you rich and cost of living is low. Places like Singapore won't work - currency conversion doesn't buy you much, and cost of living is high.
Ah, the benefits of not making low-pay jobs illegal: the maid _has_ a job, and a middle-class family can afford to hire her for what the work is worth to them.
This in contrast to the USA, where it is illegal to pay her what the work is worth (thanks to "minimum wage" laws), so she doesn't have a job and must be given some form of welfare, which the middle-class family which wants to hire her ends up paying without the benefit of a clean house in return.
My maid does the job because the job is pretty light weight and takes about half an hour on an average day. This setup enables her to work at other places.
Maids aren't paid highly here because there is no welfare, the general income is quite low, and my maid can either make those 800 bucks working for me, or has to find another job. Depending on the situation, it might or might not be working well for her.
I am saying since there is no welfare, and she needs money, she might be going through a job which doesn't pay enough.
I don't know how does the minimum wage calculation work, and it might be more than 800 INR for about half an hour of work(+/- 10 minutes - most of the days I don't cook, so no dishes. Sometimes I use almost every dish in my house) per day.
But consider the minimum wage were much higher and enforced say 5000 INR. I don't need her - I don't cook very often and I can clean the house once in a while. In that case, she would lose the job she has now, and would be eligible for welfare. Depending on the amount, she might be better off with this scenario.
This is all hypothetical though. She does multiple jobs, and works for me because it's convenient for her. She gets some cash for light weight work. That spares her time for her own home and other jobs. A minimum wage and welfare system might result in a scenario where she makes slightly more than she does now, but might prove more demanding in terms of time spent and labor.
My father - who is a retired bank officer which means he is relatively well off - wouldn't be comfortable spending more than something like Rs. 300 or so on a night out.
Depends on the time frame that you have in mind. If you've been there in the last year or so, you could see yourself spending more than 3-5K for the 1K night out you're referring to.
wait!! you are saying a family night out in India would cost more than 1700 INR? Unless you are going to a five star restaurant, I am pretty sure this is not the case.
This would be awesome if they don't allow the cost to increase, down the road.
I went to India last year and an average Indian restaurant meal at a non-high end restaurant was about 200INR for 2 people.
For a group of 8-10 people it was about 1000INR to eat.
On the other hand - if i went out to Dominoes and got a medium pie which basically only fed me - it cost 300-400INR. Quite the price difference. I noticed that most families got the single serve pizza and split it with their kids which cost about 50INR (that was the size of a personal pan pizza).
Now we stayed about decent hotels time to time on our travels and the cost varied as well. We stayed at a decent hotel (probably 2-3star - not even) in mumbai and that cost us 2000INR a night; in goa we paid about 1200INR a night for even a crappier room but it had AC. But on average a hotel room cost about 1000INR/night. If we stayed at a high-end we would pay 5000+INR a night.
It's basically slow with its 300mhz processor. You can easily get 600mhz tabs at 38$ directly from the Chinese factories.
But, there is one good thing about this, which is the GPRS capability. It also comes with 100 mb free data per month plan.