Amazon’s $50 Fire tablet reviewed
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
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.
Android is just as much for communications and learning. Quite decent for writing also with a bt keyboard.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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)
For instance, I'm thinking of adding an in-home video intercom system by mounting a bunch of these on various walls around the house. Just hoping that someone figures out rooting to make the software side of creating a single-purpose tablet a bit easier.
Having spent many many months looking for a combo of cheap boards + touch interfaces, I'm very excited. Now if you can root that thing without spending a couple of days staring down esoteric error messages or fighting with drivers post-root, I'm ordering the 6pack right away.
Maybe even flash Arch Linux arm on it...
The app I made is a webview wrapper based on this project https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/93-I-made-a-better-...
I can see some ways that my Nexus 6 is a better device than my Fire. In large, it doesn't matter. My eInk reader is better for reading than either. And for being productive I need more than either can do.
Add video and I think you've pretty much described the bulk of what many people do with a computer. :-)
Other than planes (where I 1. spend way too much time and 2. find tablets are way more usable than laptops), I go back and forth on how much I use a tablet around the house. Ultimately, you do generally have to be fine with a tablet being enough better at media consumption than a computer that it's worth having an additional device that can't do everything the computer can do. I did buy a Chromebook earlier in the year to leave out on my dining room table and I have found myself using it for things that I was tending to use my iPad for.
(I also agree that for just reading text, an eInk reader is best.)
Oh, I didn't take it that way. I like my tablets but I do think there's sometimes pushed into roles that they aren't very good for. (In general, I don't think they're a great fit for most secondary school educational purposes for example.)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/fire-hd/general/how-to-upgra...
Short answer : It is non-trivial.
I have a nexus 7 (2013) and gave the kid my 2012 Nexus 7, and I'm still thinking of getting one of these just because. And a Nexus 9, which I think is drool-worthy.
Most of them are speced about the same as this Fire tablet or slightly better at a somewhat lower price as long as you take care to weed out a few 800x480 resolution ones.
There's also some variability in built quality and look and feel (in particular it's worth paying attention to thickness and whether the case is flush with the glass or not as there's some really clunky ones) but overall you can pick pretty much random models and have a pretty decent odds of getting something similar to the reviewed one, quite likely with more flash - 8GB is really low, especially if they've not been very careful about how it's partitioned.
One more caveat: The specs of the lowest end Chinese tablets sometimes go downhill depending on variations of component prices. E.g. suddenly you find RAM on offer has halved without changes to the price, or flash, or the display resolution drops. So don't think even what's billed as the same model will be the same specs without actually carefully checking the specs you care about.
As you point out, I was a bit flippant in my description, because obsolete specifications don't mean low-quality as such, and while AMZN can sell truckloads of low-end tablets, you're right that they couldn't sell poorly-made tablets and not have that redound poorly on their brand.
Guess what, three year old tablet specs may not make for a aspirational purchase but but they do make for a perfectly usable mini-tablet. I'd been wanting a smaller tablet to use when traveling and this was just the ticket. I couldn't justify spending hundreds of dollars for a second smaller iPad but $50? Sure. That I can watch Amazon Prime videos offline makes it even better.
However - that's just Android. The lack of Google Apps, Play Store and Google Play Services is more of an issue but the seriousness of that totally depends what you're expecting to do with it.
But if it ran a reasonable version of Android, with simple Amazon skinning and apps, it would be a no-brainer purchase at $50.
fireos is garbage. you can't have a calendar or clock widget. any widget. none.
the launcher is a joke designed by committee. you get a huge icon of the recent apps 1 huge icon at a time. which would show app data on the bottom, but not even amazon own apps use it. so it's just one big icon for you. always. from the screenshots, on this version they changed that to instead show your media hosted in Amazon's cloud. yeah, that will be useful to have using 60% of my home screen at all times.
then the reviewer says he didn't find any app missing... well that made me sure that is a paid fluffy piece (and I'm done with arstech site forever thanks to that) because besides Facebook, every app is missing. from youtube to Firefox. you get nothing but social site apps and fart apps.
When you log in it 'feels' like a cloud-powered, personalized device and I imagine if you had a second device and were to log in it would probsbly bring much of your info over. im curious to see what they do with tying the Amazon account to a device in the future.
I was also a little worried as a non-US resident that it might be locked into amazon.COM accounts when I use a different locale, but everyting seems to smoothly work.
Its no ipad, but I can buy ten of them for a price of an ipad. As a longtime ipad owner I finally feel like theres competition, and the price point is unbeatable. IF you gave me $50 to spend on a tablet, Id get the fire. if you gave me $200, Id get four fires. If you gave me 500 Id buy an ipad, and if you gave me $550 Id buy an ipad and a fire.
You cant go wrong at that price point, but for what its worth when its in the hand it feels like a device I would have expected to pay $150-$250 from anybody else.