$35 Indian Tablet Has Until March 31st To Ship or Be Cancelled 46
damitr writes "With a lot of fanfare the Indian Government had launched a $35 tablet named Aakash (The Sky). Despite skepticism, the government went ahead with the project. But delays in production and deployment of the tablet have left the project in risk of failure. The manufacturer has been unable to supply the required 100,000 units, and a deadline of March 31 has been set. The new minister Pallam Raju says: 'Aakash is only a tablet... there are other such devices as well. While work will continue to develop it and increase its productivity, manufacturing is obviously a problem.'"
For what it's worth, they did manage to ship 17,000 of them. It looks like meeting the deadline is impossible and the $35 tablet is dead.
Easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
They should just outsource production to Ind... no wait...
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Informative)
Curiously, they handed it to a London-headquartered Canadian firm [wikipedia.org](with a slightly... unenviable... reputation for order fulfillment), who then handed the manufacturing side back to an Indian firm [quadelectronics.com]. No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...
Too many cooks, etc.
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like everybody is out to demonstrate how good they are at outsourcing. Just wait until the Chinese and Africans too get in on the act - then we might see jobs coming back to the US
And the Indian government was involved in creating a tablet because....?
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like everybody is out to demonstrate how good they are at outsourcing. Just wait until the Chinese and Africans too get in on the act - then we might see jobs coming back to the US
And the Indian government was involved in creating a tablet because....?
The Indian government's interest in all this had something to do with an e-textbook initiative. Apparently their dead-tree versions are seriously uneven in terms of age and availability, so the prospect of something that could be updated more easily and be all 21st century and stuff was attractive.
What is somewhat less clear is why this got them involved in hardware, rather than just software and content. There are only about a zillion Chinese OEMs slitting each other's throats to build slightly cheaper crap-tablets, and many of them produce quite similar designs around a handful of cheap SoCs. Sure, doing platform validation is a pain in the ass; but they could have had multiple, interchangeable, vendors eating out of the palm of their hand instead of having one pet fuckup...
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...
At $35 for a 7" touchscreen tablet, how much cheaper can you get on parts? A Fisher-Price "tablet" [fisher-price.com] (no touch screen, no shift key, has a "10" key instead of a "0," but it does have a light-up LCD screen that changes color) costs $25, and even then consumers in the two-to-five-year-old bracket are refusing to use it because they keys are too cheaply made. What "cheaper parts" could the sub-subcontractors possibly swap in? Horse meat [wikipedia.org]? Melamine [wikipedia.org]?
I can see the reviews now: "Bought these for my kids, but they leak some kind of liquid. Kids won't touch them, but the cat loved it. The cat's dead now, vet said his kidneys failed, so at least I'm saving money on cat food."
Re: (Score:3)
Have you seen the wholesale price of tablets in China?
http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=android+tablet [aliexpress.com]
Replace the capacitive screens with something cheaper, buy in bulk, and you're almost at $35.
Re: (Score:3)
I imagine if you replaced the CPU with some gravel, you could drive the price even closer to the target!
Re: (Score:2)
Probably improve the performance too. :)
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Informative)
$35 was the target subsidized price. The target actual price was around twice that(which is pretty much the going rate [dx.com] for 7 inch tablets of unknown-but-suspect quality from nameless pacific rim OEMS).
Re: (Score:2)
Too many crooks
Easiest FTFY ever.
Re: (Score:2)
No surprise (Score:2, Funny)
It's engineers and target customers were too busy shitting in the streets to bother.
Re: (Score:2)
more likely datawind realized that selling customer info wasn't going to make up the deficit in price(mandatory product registration).
what's intriguing is that aakash2 was/is supposed to have gsm+3g calls - though unfulfilled patent probs too.
Re: (Score:1)
They poop big in the streets of bangalore and mumbai though.
Re: (Score:3)
At an expected price of only $35, one should expect what has happened.
You can currently source a capacitive multitouch ICS device with a camera and fast SoC from eBay for $65 delivered to your door, first-world, quantity one. Could an order of 100,000 units with a resistive screen, without any middlemen get that down to $35? It seems entirely do-able. It's not going to be a great device, but better than no device.
Re: (Score:2)
Prices dont always get cut in half just because you ordered 100,000 units.
Re: (Score:2)
Prices dont always get cut in half just because you ordered 100,000 units.
Agreed. Fortunately, that was only one of seven pricing factors I mentioned.
Re:Before trolling starts... (Score:4, Insightful)
I really do believe "you get what you paid for,"
If you're a third-worlder then $35 is a lot.
Re: (Score:1)
I really do believe "you get what you paid for,"
If you're a third-worlder then $35 is a lot.
That doesn't mean it is enough to get a good tablet.
Re: (Score:3)
That's the opposite of "you get what you paid for." It's called "Marketing."
Re:Before trolling starts... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the opposite of "you get what you paid for." It's called "Marketing."
I think you misunderstood. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 190a: "When you don't get what you think you paid for, then you paid for marketing, and you got what paid for." It's a sub-rule of Rule 190: "Hear all, trust nothing."
Re: (Score:2)
....
I really do believe "you get what you paid for," but then, I'm reminded of the story of golf ball finders a British con artist was selling as "bomb detectors" for several thousand dollars each.
A more realistic version of that old saw is "You rarely get more than you paid for."
Anyone who has been around a while realizes that you frequently get less than you paid for.
Re:IeBay them (Score:4, Interesting)
If the government don't buy them,I am sure hobbyists and hackers around the world would find use for them if they were only $35 each.
You wouldn't be able to sell them to individuals for $35 - Supply chains, distribution, packaging, returns, payment processing... All would drive up the cost. Price point would probably be $79 or so which, surprise surprise, is what a cheapo consumer Chinese tablet sells for.
Corruption (Score:1)
How much of that failure can be attributed to a filthy corrput government and poor management of resources?
Being from another country run by a highy corrupt government (Brazil), I'm pretty sure that this $35 tablet was never meant to exist as a real product. It was only a sophisticated money laudring scheme with a few prototypes to show for it.
Re: (Score:1)
Cancelled?? Browncoats will never let it happen! (Score:2)
You can't take "The Sky" from me!
Re: (Score:2)
Sub $100 tablets are already available. (Score:2, Offtopic)
There is no shortage of low end tablets. A 35 dollar tablet is just going to carry the same stigma as the Coby and Archos products. I wouldn't even give these devices to a kid as a toy because they're buggy and barely have the specs to run Android.
People who can't shell out for an iPad have plenty of mid-range tablets to choose from by Asus, Samsung and Sony, not to mention the Kindle Fire is a pretty decent tablet when rooted and flashed with Cyanogen.
Lemme guess (Score:2)
They outsourced management to some first world company (ok, most likely it was an international bidding that was 'won' by some first world company), who outsourced production to India, where the outsourcer decided it's cheaper to outsource to China, and they caught on by now too and the whole deal ended up being assembled somewhere in Africa.
Keep dumping wages, countries of the first world, maybe some time we will become the outsource center of Africa! So we can then build the tablets, ship them through Afr
C'mon (Score:2)
Indian Vaporware (Score:1)
Had some innovative features though... (Score:1)
..like being the worlds first 100% wipe-clean, shit-proof tablet for when the targeted domestic market use it to wipe their asses in public.