India's $35 tablet ready to ship | Hacker News Reader

India's $35 tablet ready to ship

penn-olson.com

111 pointsnamank55 comments

I live in India and here are my thoughts:

It's not about the price or how cool it is. First things first, it is a nifty achievement that 'can haz' the potential. BUT is cheap hardware really the most important thing here? No. Here is why.

It is not based on any pedagogical concept at all. Anything targeted at the students in primary schools must be based on some kind of sound pedagogical framework. From software to the user experience.

Slapping a stock Andriod OS on a cheap tablet is not going to solve the problems of the primary school system in India. Prerecorded video lectures can never work for school classrooms where teacher-student interactivity is indispensable. Let's stop singing praises of our "Great" "Innovation" for a moment and really think about it for a second. Do primary students really want to listen to someone blabbing on for an hour through a video? NO. It does not work like that. If it worked like that, best schools would have replaced their teachers with tubes and boomboxes.

Where is the content delivery infrastructure? I run a small web application development company in the heart of a capital city of a state and heck, internet connectivity gives us headaches every once in a while. You can imagine the scenario in the remotest parts of the country. And how much does internet cost here - $100 for a 4Mbps connection with 35GB/month data limit and it is the home plan not the commercial plan. With so much costly connectivity and abysmal infrastructure, how will the content be delivered.

Involved costs are exorbitant. As others have already pointed out, the costs involved are not a trivial amount. Not only the tablet but the delivery network and other necessary infrastructure. Can the state governments bear the such costs. No.

Technology is nice; Its not the silver bullet. Let me say this once for all. 99% of Indian school(or college level) teachers are bullshit. They don't know anything about teaching or the subject matter they are "teaching". I did not know this when I went to school. But now I am 28 and I have 9 cousins between the age 7 - 16 in some of the top schools in my city. And what their teachers teach them is bullshit. Example: I found out one of my 5th grade cousin does not know what a number line is. Despite being a part of his maths curriculum, the teacher just skipped over it. So, advice to the government and education departments: FIX THE DAMN SCHOOL FIRST. Finally look at what Indian teachers are teaching in schools http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FViBJg6X_24 even if you do not understand Hindi you will still pick a lot of things.

There are bigger problems than "lack of a cheap tablet". Children are dying because of malnutrition. Farmers are committing suicides. What Indian government does not want anyone to know is that:

- 65 tribal children died of malnutrition in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

- 125 farmers committed suicide because huge debts in Deccan states.

- Indian security forces butchered 110 peaceful protesters in Kashmir.

during the same period when India was busy spending 150 million USD on Commonwealth games.

http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/children-dying...

Finally, in my very very humble and personal opinion, all this tablet is ever going to achieve is become another toy in the closets of children from middle to upper middle class families.

PS: Does anyone recall India's own custom built, secure OS? Anyone?

I think you overestimate the difficulty in "automating" education and providing it in india. children can learn pretty well using online video - khan academy has proven that, and khan academy is even building a complete interactive educational framework.

The high cost of bandwidth can be probably solved pretty inexpensively using caching at the village level. caching is a well proven technology and is a big part of the backbone of the internet.

When you say "fix the damn schools first" you underestimate the size of the problem. this is a huge huge problem, very difficult one , maybe even unsolvable at the scale and the conditions india has. see , even rich countries that had decades to build an education system are struggling with building a high quality education system using teachers. and mostly they're not doing very well.

I think india has no choice. it has to invent a new, high quality and huge scale education system. and giving each student a tablet is a good first step to get there.

Does Khan Academy have documented instances where they've replaced a teacher in the classroom with videos? From my understanding, KA currently works well as a supplement to traditional classroom education instead of simply replacing it.

I was talking about khan as an example. if you want totaly automated self learning , look for the "hole in the wall" education experiments. they sucseeded.

But i think khan academy can make the teacher job much easier, so maybe even no so good teacher can achieve good results.

I tried showing Khan Academy videos to my cousins going to very expensive private schools where 95% curriculum is in English right from the kindergarten. Here is what I observed.

- They understood a lot from it. In some case even more than their classrooms.

- They have a lot of questions about the subject matter. Which Mr. Khan could not answer as he was present not here.

- Most of their questions were there because of the English vocabulary or the sentences my cousins could not understand.

So yes. Khan Academy is doing a great job. I am learning higher maths again now. But videos cannot replace a good teacher and English is not the native language here. Even if we wanted to translated the videos, it would still be a monumental tasks as there are about 6000 spoken languages in India.

And yes I agree with you. Not just India, whole world needs a new education system. But the a particular technology should not the foundation of it. What we need is:

- a pedagogically sound foundation

- teachers trained in the methods of teaching, not just the subject matter

- then use the technology to enable this system.

If you want to build a huge , high quality education system, it better to start with lower quality , easier to scale solution and improve it, than start with the standard education system. why ? because the rate of improvement of the cheaper system would be much faster , and with time it would be better.

So let's say you add a few improvements to the khan system: translations. and educational games that students like to use. and a way to enable students help each other and get credit for it. and a way to measure where each student is stuck so the computer can give it better/different explanations , or more exercises to practice , or ask for the teacher to help him with this subject. and maybe measure teacher performance and help train him as well , as part of his job. and ways to match educational content to the student prefered learning style. and ways to measure educational content so that the content can be improved. and probably a million of other usefull things.

So there are tons of ways to improve. and once you built some small or great improvement , with a click of a button you can deploy it, and a day later a hundred million students(or at least tens of thousands) can now learn better and faster.

Exactly my point. What we need is a system with sound pedagogical foundation, not necessarily at the scale of millions of student at first. May be start with 30 students in 1st standard in some government run school. Groom these 30 as they move up the grades. Compare contrast results every year, slowly expand the reach and improve. and bam, we have a pedagogically sound education system in 10 - 15 years.

PS: Government run schools are already shot to hell here is India.

I don't think designing a reasonable pedagogical foundation is the problem for india's public schools. you can just copy the one from a decent private school.

But can you teach it to a million teachers ? can you guarantee they will use it? can you make the teachers engaging ? are they good ? do they even come to to work ? will they take bribes for good test results ?

Can you really do all those ? those are tough challenges. india have tried to solve those for quite some time now(probably a few decades). the results are not very good. and the problem is not unique to india. even the u.s. is troubled by education.

Now compare this to the rate of improvement of technology based solutions : khan academy , based on the work of a SINGLE person which started in 2005 , now tutors tens or hundred of million people , pretty successfully and for free. even bill gates's children use it.

Challenges will always be there. Every few years there will be a different set of challenges. The point is do we give up because of these challenges. No. We keep striving. Generation after generation. That is how mankind has progressed. We need to do something similar for our education systems. Neither I say that I know how to do it nor I am saying let's do it all together. I am not sure what will work and what won't. But we(educationists + parents + government) need to pickup the ball and start doing something.

Mr. Khan doing a great job. A great service to the mankind. His contributions towards helping people learn things is almost as important as those who invent/discover the stuff in first place. It is a great tool for people to learn. But I say it again Khan Academy is not the replacement for the primary school teacher.

One thing that might work immediately is "make profit making from schools illegal".

- Every school run by a group of trustworthy people selected from society by the people whose children go to those schools.

- High salaries for the teachers but equally high accountability.

- Any surplus to be invested back into the school.

- Severe punishment by law for teachers, educationists and school managers for failing to perform duties to the best of their abilities.

Cheap tablet with network connectivity will help self motivated students to learn by themselves. I hope that access to the Internet will get rid of the incompetent teachers from their path to knowledge. Some states have taken concrete measures to get rural India connected to the Internet. Yes, there is corruption,poverty,education,health and whole lot of other problems that India needs to solve. They need not be solved in sequential order. Bringing in the politics related to Kashmir is irrelevant to this topic. Since you mentioned it, I would like to bring in another perspective. The protesters were seen as violent anti-nationals by one group and as peaceful freedom fighters by others. Unfortunately for India, the grouping was based, to a large extent, on whether one was a Hindu or a Muslim.

Disagree strongly. Take 10 year old boy or a girl, give him the cheap tablet and unlimited internet supply and now read your statement again.

"Cheap tablet with network connectivity will help self motivated students to learn by themselves"

and answer this. What is the meaning of self motivation for a 10 year old?

What do you mean? Motivation comes from curiosity and a 10 year old has that more than most! Give him an internet connection and he can learn almost anything!

Agreed motivation comes from curiosity. But in case of 10 year old with all the distractions on the internet, can he/she or will he/she really spend enough time on Khan Academy to learn maths, science, language etc. on his own?

If that is the case then you should be force feeding the child to become something they never wanted to be. Children coming from poor families will focus their energies on learning especially when will head from likes of Bill Gates that khan academy is all you need to learn something.They will atleast get started and go for it. Sugata mitra is experiment[1] clearly demonstrate what childrens can do once they are left to their own devices.

Problem with children is not the desire to learn, problem is bad teachers who does nothing but inhibit and curb their student's creativity.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_t...

Dear sudhirc. Please read my comments. I am constantly mentioning "primary school education".

I don't give a damn about careers, I don't give a damn about degrees; because by the time people are in (senior)high school, they are smart to use the 3 pound coconut God put on their shoulders and figure things out for themselves.

All I care about primary school education. And children NEED hand holding and general direction providing at such a nascent level which can only be provided by a trained teacher within a pedagogically sound system and can never be achieved by any level of technologically marvelous device of any sorts. Period.

That is why when I have children they are not going to school until they are at least 10 years old. :P

PS: I don't care what Bill Gates says. Since when is he an authority on education? What are his credentials/contributions in the field?

I was busy using my dad's telecommuting PC to dial BBSes and learn to code when I was 10. It bothers me to no end when people underestimate the capabilities of children.

Based on the evidence of a good friend from Nigeria, I agree. In his school the teachers took the money and disappeared, so the students got together and taught themselves. A cheap device that can access information resources on the internet would have given them access to a lot more resources then they had at the time; and he studied for and achieved a good degree in engineering.

Here comes the relevance from an earlier discussion of mine http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623722 - "Nobody in India uses computers in Indian languages".

This tablet can revolutionize rural education, especially since the Indian govt mandates rural connectivity as a pre-requisite to handing out telecom wireless licenses. But you cannot teach village kids in English - especially, if in a few years they have to go and read the land records, inheritance documents, local newspapers which are in regional vernacular.

But the system is running Android - guess what is the top request on the Android bug list? (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?sort=-stars) Arabic language support.

Same problem as Indic fonts. Same problem on all Linuxes.

.. but Arabic isn't terribly huge in India. Hindi is.

Edit: Ah, thanks for the clarification.

OP: "Same problem as Indic fonts."

Android 2.3 did bring in support for Hindi and Arabic. <http://www.talkandroid.com/22956-android-2-3-gingerbread-dou...;

Though, I doubt if the tablet would be able to run Gingerbread.

not sure if that is entirely true - this bug is still open http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1618

Again, if they still used a non-smartfont technology for compound scripts (I think that's what they call when two alphabets join together to form a new alphabet), it wont really solve the problem.

they could simply use a glyph to indicate that this letter and the next are to be joined. not the prettiest, but eminently usable.

> But you cannot teach village kids in English - especially, if in a few years they have to go and read the land records, inheritance documents, local newspapers which are in regional vernacular.

As the person you quoted, I felt obligated to respond ;)

Why not educate them in English, if the resources (i.e., teachers) and demand exist? As for reading legal documents, bilinguality isn't exactly that difficult to achieve, especially when the language of concern is your native one.

I personally get really annoyed at those "will ship in x days" announcements. It's almost impossible to tell when those are marketing vs actual facts.

I believe it when I can buy it on Amazon/eBay/... and it gets delivered within a week.

I agree. If it was "ready to ship" it would be shipping.

As the Hole-In-The-Wall experiment showed even slum children with no education figured out how to use the internet and learn from it.

http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

So I think the kids will figure out how to use it well and learn from it as long as we can get into their hands.

The language issue is not a huge problem in my view. Because at the very least the kids will learn english using this thing.

Also you could preload links to youtube videos showing lectures in the kids's mother tongue.

I wish this thing had a 3g connectivity as that is available in a lot of rural places in India. Wifi is going to be tough in a village.

My dad's village has water for 3 hours a day and electricity for about 20 hours a day but I've never seen the internet connectivity ever fail me.

Hardware is the most obvious part of the equation, and it's amazing to see that part nearing solved.

The less obvious, but no less important part, however, is software. What will these things run? Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio aren't going to help kids learn to read, build an understanding of the world around them, and ultimately create value in society. I'm sure you can come up with a handful of "educational" apps from the Android Marketplace, but for these to really be valuable in schools, they're going to need professionally-developed, curriculum-integrated software, and teachers are going to need to be trained in using it to its potential.

Having a $50/$35/$10 tablet sets the stage for great things, but that's all it does. It enables real advances in education, but it won't make those advances by itself.

A major problem with education in rural India is the lack of (qualified) regular teachers. So, _if_ we could provide decent internet access, it will open them up to good resources on the internet, like Khan Academy.

Though, it is only natural for us to be skeptic, it may well be worth a try.

"Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio aren't going to help kids learn to read"

Straw man alert. It should be incredibly obvious that the tablets will have etexts, note taking, html lessons and quizzes, flash cards, etc. In short all the things kids do to learn 100 or 50 or 20 years ago but with the efficiency of a converged device.

>What will these things run? Twitter apps, tip calculators, weather widgets, and Angry Birds Rio [...]

Why focus on apps? What they will run is a web browser. Being able to connect to the HTML/Web platform is more important than the OS.

Of course a single hardware device does not solve all of the issues in education. While a browser is not educational software in itself, any internet connected device with a browser has great potential to do the things you list. If nothing else, they can connect to Wikipedia in 100 languages.

If you think that education happens at school you're sorrily mistaken. My 4 year old is reading Grade 1 books and doing multiplication, my 7 year old equally advanced for her age, and my 7 year old nephew is learning algebra.

Why? Because at every opportunity I facilitate their learning. When they ask a question, I help them to find the answer themselves as much as possible. They learn geography, geology and biology when we go on road trips, when they ask why they look like me and their mom, they learn about DNA. Sure, they don't understand DNA fully but they have a concept of it upon which they can build and ask further questions.

Cheap tablets with connectivity allow us to create a much better system for education, one guided by experimentation and refinement. Imagine having learners watch videos and then when they have a question they get individual attention. You can have project style learning where learners choose projects to work on and then learn the skills and knowledge necessary to complete such a project.

Tablets allow us to move education into the field where anyone can learn the things they need to know to complete the project. This is a GIANT leap forward in education.

Revised to $50, per the article.

But still, at $50, it's quite a nice toy. And if it encourages -anyone- to read, it's doing a good thing.

I don't understand. The $49 price point has been achieved under govt subsidy. How is that a technology innovation? They can subsidize it down to any price they want. Wasn't the deal to actually develop a tablet which costs $35 to build/sale?

Ok, so what happened to the simputer? Apparently the project is considered a failure after releasing only thousands of the devices.

Tack onto that the failure of XO/OLPC, and you have all these successive efforts to get cheap computing devices in the hands of children, hoping like magic, the device will herald a transformation of education in rural villages.

Will an android tablet succeed where the others failed? Unless we know why the other projects failed, I don't see why this one would succeed.

How did XO/OLPC fail? I'm curious, I quit following the project. I thought it just never really got off the ground. Was that the only failure or something different?

Assuming India has 250 Million students who could make use of such a device. If every one of them is given this tablet:

250 Million * $35 (will probably be even lesser when produced in such a massive quantity) = ~9 Billion USD

Add distribution and other chores.. takes it to ~10 Billion USD.

To add some perspective, India's infamous 2G scam is 5 times bigger than that.

[Edit]: Costs could go even lower if the device is ad supported, like kindle.

2g scam?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam

It doesn't matter if all the kids do is play Tetris on it all day. Most of them will. Thats how they learn, thats how they will pick up the technology. Then the curious ones will try to download more games for it and in the process figure out that Android is open source and that they can make their own games for it.

That is when the real purpose of these tablets comes into play.

I remember I got my first computer in grade 2. All I did was play games. By grade 10, I was setting up my own http/ftp/email servers. Then I tried installing mac on windows. By grade 11, I knew everything that went inside the box. Now, I'm studying computer engineering.

All kids need is support (infrastructure for education), they are already curious enough to take whatever it is you give them to the next level.

If it is even half as good as the video demo, it will be a huge success IMHO.

It's hard to tell how the performance will be. In the video any actual footage of the device in use was sped up.

As others have said, I'll believe it when I see it.

In a way, the real question isn't "How do apps written for more powerful devices perform?", but "How will apps written specifically for this device perform?" Is the hardware merely underpower relative to current Android apps, or is the device fundamentally full of large amounts of latency in many subsystems?

Impressive. What corners had to be cut in order to keep the cost down to such a level.

Resistive screen for one - notice the stylus. Also, probably old hardware and little RAM.

While the difference between this tablet and the Samsung Tab or iPad may be huge, the difference between no computer and this one is far far bigger.

In the video they mentioned "2gb" of ram.

7" Resistive touch screen, 32GB hard disk, 2GB RAM, 2 USB ports, WiFi.

http://techpp.com/2011/06/15/indias-low-cost-sakshat-tablet-...

There is usually a lot of government subsidy involved in things like these.

This looks awesome, could be so good in education. Need to make a software to quickly put CM7/something 2.3.4 based on it, mind.

Anyone got a link to the specs?

To paraphrase a line from Stuart Brand's amazing book The Media Lab: "Hardware wants to be free."

...and by "ready to ship" they mean "not ready to ship, but might be by the end of the month."

In all fairness how much do the ipad components actually cost.

Nice down vote. I'm serious how impressive is a 35$ tablet? The core component cost on a lot of the technology we use is fairly low most of the expense is in R&D and advertising. Things like 64gb flash drives and so forth can be priced out in bulk for around 12-13 dollars a unit.

http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indias_35_tablet_Saksha... this article indicates that they will ship 10,000 units to IIT Rajasthan late this month, but 90k more units will be available over the next several months... but why? There are only a few hundred students there.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Android FTW!

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