News DataWind's $35 tablet project hits trouble

DataWind's Aakash project to create a $35 tablet for the Indian government has hit a roadblock.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/02/23/datawind-tablet-project-trouble/1

 

I can't believe a $35 tablet will be anything other than a poor shade of a product compared to mainstream devices that can cost 15-20 times as much.

I'm surprised you can even get a touchscreen, let alone the hardware behind it, for that kind of cost.

 

$35 is mad for a tablet i have been looking a making a raspberry pi with a small lcd screen that can run on a few batteries but all i can find scren wise is a 4.2'' lcd for £140 and that still needs somthing to give it a hdmi input

 

For $35 it will be made out of cheese.

The Hong-Kong-special I bought from eBay was £140 last year and it is one of the worst electronic devices I have ever used. So god only knows what that thing would be like!

 

For that price it will be a Pentium 2 soldered to an old Palm pda screen

 

A smidgen over £100 will net you a blackberry playbook! I've had several tablets, and the playbook is the best apart from an ipad (but that's twice as much), it's amazingly solidly built and by far the most responsive tab I've seen. Now that they're running android just fine I don't see why you'd have anything else.

 

After all the tablets I've seen to date they all put me off with the low PPI.

If the iPad3 really does come with a retina-like screen and has at least the same PPI as the iPhone 4 then I'll have one.

Went to the apple store with the cash in my pocket for an iPad 2, but after seeing the crap PPI I just couldn't part with the money.

 

For £30 you really can't complain at all! I was really considering getting a kindle . but I could get this, get the kindle app for android and I'm off!

I think this is an incredible engineering feat as well as an incredible procurement task - like everyone has said, getting parts to do this for £30 odd is incredible!

I'm going to order one when I can and then see if i can fold on it

 

The massive amount of point missing is going to do my head in.

It's not a $35 tablet, it's a tablet which is made of materials costing a total of $50, sold to students for $35 thanks to subsidies by the Indian government. As it the article clearly states, the commercial version of this tablet (the one any non-Indian students would be looking at) is set to cost 2,999Rs, about $61. No one here is going to be seeing a tablet hitting shelves for $35.

Secondly, this is an educational device for a developing country. Something like a £100 Blackberry Playbook (not to point fingers) is multiple times more expensive and likely to be unaffordable even with subsidies. These expensive devices are simply not an option for the targets of this tablet project. The "$35 tablet" isn't meant to be a competitor against devices costing many times more than it, it's meant to get technology into the hands of students who can't afford most electronics.

 

Terrible idea - e-readers and tablets are completely different things. Reading on any tablet is horrible.

You need an E-ink screen to read on, not a tablet screen, sadly there isn't anything capable of doing both at the moment. Even a kindle fire is awful for reading on!

 

For you, but I read a lot on LCD screens. Hey I'm doing it now. There's no doubt eInk screens are great and do genuinely offer a better experience if you have ambient light, but have you actually read a novel on an iPad?

I use my iPad for reading at night without having to resort to partner disturbing lights, I can't do that with a Kindle or a real book.

Now when they bring out a daylight readable self illuminating high PPI fast responsive battery efficient 24bit colour panel... then we'll be cooking on gas!

 

Am i the only one that thinks 4inches of rain an hour is a ridiculously large amount of water for a elctronic device to withstand?

 

This is unfortunate news indeed.

 

Maybe because they're out of production, and the $99 price tag (at a massive loss) was Leo's last FU before he got canned? Might be that, I'm not positive.

 

+1

Why is it people always feel the need to compare every single product under the sun to their own needs and have almost zero empathy and consideration for the needs of others. As you quite rightly state, this is to get technology into the hands of those people who have never had access to a computer, or a mobile phone, or the Internet.

I see adverts for sanitary towels and tampons....but I don't imagine how they'd feel on me and then write it up on a forum bitching that they aren't designed for my (male) anatomy