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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

I was in a discussion the other day how every other attempt at bringing computing to underdeveloped parts of the world has more or less failed (OLPC for example), yet cheap Android phones have managed to become ubiquitous in places without stable electricity, running water, and stable or repressive governments.

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Scale is the easiest way to make something cheap, and having a device targeted at every human rather than just school kids is going to be the best way to achieve scale.

But as far as education goes, phones aren’t as good as a laptop as far as form factor. But better than nothing I suppose!

More likely is that cell phones all have mobile data, whereas laptops have not historically had that except on high end business models. Devices are pretty useless to the average person without the internet, so in places with poor connectivity laptops end up being useless.

OLPC also suffered from durability issues (repairs required sending the laptop back to the US, IIRC?) and cost issues (they never did hit the $100/unit price point)

Even Raspberry Pi leverages the scale of Broadcom chips, which also get used in Android phones

OLPC was a really cool idea, but it turned out to be yet another in a long line of "good-idea fairy visits a wealthy first-worlder with yet another way to fix the third world", like What Three Words, etc.

That’s a pretty revisionist history that ignores a lot of how it was done. It required local partnerships, used a lot of local educational material, and had a huge amount of involvement on the ground during deployments.

It also ignores that the very cell phone penetration we see earlier also comes from wealthy countries in creation — the main OS is still supplied by Google.

That's exactly how it goes, unfortunately for more and more people Fecabook is "The Internet"

edit: Oh , spelled it incorrectly, but a better way to spell it would be Fecalbook for the amounts of shit posted there.

You can get a usb-c hub for 10$ with hdmi and usb ports.

That's essentially a desktop computer from the early 2010s in even the weakest Android phones.

More than enough to develop web apps on, I think a kid in Kenya was able to develop an entire website on a feature phone.

Samsung is trying to push Dex , so we'll see. It is worth noting many cheaper phones don't support HDMI out, but you could still figure out a way to project your phone to a monitor and have a desktop .

Yes there is an interview with that feature phone guy on Hanselminutes podcast.

I think that's how it goes with any distribution problem. If you make it cheap enough then it becomes ubiquitous and even spreads into impoverished areas. I believe this is the only way to eliminate world hunger for example.

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