Low-Cost Indian Tablet Project Falls To Corruption 144
symbolset writes "The first Aakash tablet proposed for India schools has failed. Datawind managed to deliver the $45 Android tablet as reported here previously, but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold. Facing a loss in revenue it's turning into a disaster for the small Canadian company as they are now proving unable to deliver both the Aakash tablet and the parallel retail product. Senior executives have begun to flee. The company has presold a great many tablets, and delivery failure reports are beginning to mount. Is this the Phantom console of this decade?"
Money first (Score:2, Funny)
Get the money first and then manufacture the product.
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You clearly haven't done business in India. "Manufacture the product" is where things went off the rails here, even as stated by the summary: "but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold." Corruption is most often found in the implementation phase of things, because at that point you're committed to the bridge/road/product/building/whatever and the person demanding a bribe understands this. It's far easier to simply
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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To put that lesson in a more educative way, when you want to make the life of people better, if you need money, you'd better get the money directly from them, and not use the government as a proxy.
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When the customer starts changing the contract, the proper answer is always "No". It's tempting to think that they can only change their minds once. They can change their minds over and over until you get driven out of business, especially if they think they can buy your product directly from the manufacturer, which is now a local company. If your only contribution is capital and an idea, you've made yourself irrelevant once the product hits the production stage. Especially if the buyer and the manufacturer
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USA milspec (which as anybody knows costs thousands per unit because of how much abuse they can take. They ARE built for the battlefield after all)
Are you a troll, or do you really believe this? Because milspec often is not special in any way. It's simply "specified by the military".
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Re:Money first (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is the worst fucking troll on Slashdot since "think about your breathing."
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Re:Money first (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Android recently surpassed iOS as the primary(most popular) cell phone platform(I had no idea Symbian was on top prior to this)..
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/14693_Q1_2012_Android_OS_installed_b.php [allaboutsymbian.com]
So technically, it's the Android phone which is really popular. I suppose it doesn't hurt that there are a bazillion different staged versions of Android out there on all sorts of devices, versus ~5 versions of iOS on a very limited range of products.
Also, as MacOS is still ~27% behind Windows as the most popular OS, and only 7% above Linux OS popularity, they really aren't as ubiquitous as people make them seem. There is a lot of hype, but significantly less actual progress for the OS/equipment beyond standard-use consumers.
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kotakee or katakee?
shill is a shill shill with shills in it's shill.
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shill is a shill shill with shills in it's shill.
I am reporting you to the apostrophe police for willful and excessive use. Otherwise, the sentence was just fine.
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You are a stroke.
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Here! Here! Troll and idiot all rolled up in one.
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In other words you're an ignoramus spouting off about what you don't know.
Or are you just that MS shill?
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Or are you just that MS shill?
Hard to say who's a shill and who's just trolling these days. Whatever this one's motivation, between shills and trolls, they've just about managed to kill Slashdot as a worthwhile site to discuss interesting topics.
In this instance, the shills probably had good motivation to prevent open discussion. Datawind may have succeeded in making a cheap tablet, but they were by no means the only one. Indian (and other buyers) are spoilt for choice at the bottom of the market, with dozens of vendors selling table
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Vista got blamed because Microsoft and Intel colluded to get substandard video hardware rated as "Vista Ready".
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I finally gave up supporting my Mom's old Vista computer (marginal hardware) and installed Ubuntu. Everything works great (including sound and WiFi) with standard install. Performance is snappy. I can also support here using Remote Desktop (not needed so far).
Re:Money first (Score:5, Informative)
Wtf does Google have anything to do with manufacturing and government requirements issues? Android is software, all the problem are hardware. If you are gonna blindly bash Google, at least keep it relevant unless this is an attempt to troll.
For those of you who are to lazy to RTFA.
1) Government wants $45 laptop to have military grade ruggedness (of which was not stated until late into the game). Quote from the article, ' The criteria included being able to withstand four inches of rain, enduring shock tests when “mounted in a vehicle,” and when subject to “sudden acceleration, braking, or turning while transporting the units.” ' Normally I wouldn't consider this that bad but for a $45 laptop, I can definitely see an issue.
2) The manufacturer "signed an agreement with I.I.T. Rajasthan to manufacture what Mr. Tuli said he believes is a rival low-cost tablet." This side seems to be a mess of Corporate political issues. You can read the article for more on this yourself.
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Re:Money first (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad analogy. BSOD is a software issue because the OS didn't trap the hardware failure and crashed.
The same thing happens on Linux but at a MUCH smaller frequecy. Bad hardware (except for the processor which runs the show) shouldn't crash your system.
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[citation needed]
[brain needed]
If you don't know why this is +5 Insightful and +5 Informative, then you completely validated the entire point of this post.
Learn when "citation needed" is appropriate for use. Here's a hint, when you use in inappropriate places, such as here or in other less formal circles, you sound like a complete fucking idiot because you're demanding information but are too stupid and/or lazy to realize your means of prompting additional information is completely inappropriate. Furthermore, "citation need
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[citation needed]
Re:Money first (Score:5, Informative)
Hate to tell you. Linux doesn't have a microkernel. Hardware/driver failures crash the system (Kernel panic).
Correct attribution of failures is a major feature of microkernels.
That said hybrid kernels (including windows) do OK except the components that run in kernel (mostly video). Blue screens are much less frequent then they used to be.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Money first (Score:4, Funny)
"and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed"
Too greedy. I'd be willing to forego the cigarettes.
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"and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed"
Too greedy. I'd be willing to forego the cigarettes.
Not so! A well-known result of using the Alyson Hannigan sexbot is the uncontrollable need to light one up and sigh contentedly afterward. If you don't include the smokes, it becomes a hidden tax on Alyson Hannigan sexbots.
I thought everyone knew this.
Excuse me, I feel the urge to light up now....
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I got into a nasty situation with Vista where it would crash on startup due to some driver and instead of giving me useful information it simply immediately restarted Windows and I got stuck in a loop. I think this was an exception to the rule though - I have hardly ever seen any serious crashes on Windows in the post-Vista (and even in the late-Vista) era. It's pretty stable now, even in the presence of crash-prone drivers.
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As for TFA it has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with shitty governments wanting a pie in the sky.
Or a corrupt government that comes up with ridiculous requirements to eliminate everyone, except one local source from of the bidding process.
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Is there any online documentation on this feature where the OS can silently kill and restart the driver? I can't find any references to that other than for "VPU Recover", which is supported as far back as Windows XP.
I have recently been configuring a webserver running Windows Server 2008 R2 [wikimedia.org], which uses the same kerne
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Geez, that looks like something a Slackware user would do. And I thought Linux driver fixes could be painful!
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<statement type="worldview" style="amusing>And unlike Linux this is 100% GUI, no having to tweak CLI gobbledygook which is usually the case. Hell you can even send screen caps and your average grandma could do this one since revo is left at default settings. This is why I have said for years if Linux wishes to go anywhere CLI HAS TO BE BANNED because otherwise lazy devs use it as a crutch.</statement>
*GB opens a seltzer, sits back to watch the flame wars.* :D
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Nice try (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what town you live in (or who is paying you to live there), but to most people, Google and Android stand for options. If you want to save money, you can get a cheap Android device. If you want to pay for quality, you can get a quality Android device. You can put whatever you want on your own device. And I don't think any reasonable person would expect a $45 Android tablet to have the same capabilities or quality as an iPad, and it doesn't need to if you look at what it's designed for: to make technology available in a non-1st world state.
Of course, the nature of your post and the fact that your ID is almost as high as the National Debt show you are nothing more than a paid (at least I hope you are at least getting paid) astroturfer trying to make Google look bad. The truth is that Google is nowhere near the "bad joke around town". People like you are, though. Subtlety, try it.
Re:Nice try (Score:5, Informative)
> If you want to pay for quality, you can get a quality Android device.
It is more like: if you pay for quality, you *may* get a quality Android device, but you wont know until much later. Some manufacturers promise support and upgrades, but never deliver. In fact none of the Android manufacturers delivers consistently decent (not even outstanding) support.
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Well at least Android is 4G already........
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At $45 they were basically looking at an ereader with wifi and the ability to run some limited programs. DataWind did deliver a design that could be made and delivered at that cost, and the second generation was even better. This could have been awesome. The price point is important because India needs about a half-billion of these tablets to provide one to each student over the next decade. They have devised a k-12 curriculum to put on it.
I'm confident they will find a way, but it doesn't look like Da
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I'm confident they will find a way
I'd say they already have, which is why they're trashing the DataWind deal.
You can buy similarly specced tablets dropshipped from China for less than $40 (in volumes) now. http://kingpai.en.alibaba.com/productlist.html [alibaba.com]
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It's no wonder the quality of your posts are just a step above 'goaste' - your username is even reminiscent of 'goatse'.
incomeptent contracts != corruption (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's funny that you can't even spell incompetent [reference.com].
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Even if the sentence is framed correctly you cannot assume the intended information was passed on. Idiot.
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It's not just incompetent contracts, but also looks like there was some breach of faith somewhere alone the way.
Re:incomeptent contracts != corruption (Score:5, Informative)
incomeptent contracts != corruption
Breach of faith means that somebody failed to meet their commitments. That can mean that they signed up to do things that they later found out were harder than they thought. That's incompetence. Or more often it means that they knew they wouldn't come through and took your money anyway.
The fact that they were paid in advance for hardware tells me it's more likely corruption/fraud than plain incompetence, but often you get the incompetence rolled into a fraudulent deal.
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"$45 tablet? No sir, this is impossible. You told us $45 tabla. Now that we can arrange."
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incomeptent contracts != corruption
That may be true, but in my experience business deals require a little trust. If you think you can make a deal with untrustworthy people but protect yourself with contracts, you're naive. When you take the other guy to court because he stabbed you in the back, no result you can hope for beats never having dealt with him in the first place.
These kinds of international business deals that involve technology and design know-how transfers are especially tricky. If your overseas partner suddenly realizes that h
what did they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
India? Corruption? You don't say...
Re:what did they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like they forgot to factor in the cost of bribes. India is pretty much a 3rd world country by most standards. Money goes a long way towards having things go "right".
Re:what did they expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
The phrase 3rd world has nothing to do with standards or wealth and India is a 3rd world country, I believe.
That being said, I do not know about bribes, but I have been involved in projects where part of the team was outsourced in India and you often get what you paid for with outsourcing from what I have seen.
Re:what did they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been involved in projects where part of the team was outsourced in India and you often get what you paid for with outsourcing from what I have seen.
Let me guess
"I can hire a whole team of educated experienced developers in India for the cost of one American dev"
turns into a bunch of imaginary billing by people with fake degrees and no experience and no communication so it ends up costing more and not working.
Analogy: Tenth cost android tablet in India ends up late and doesn't work. Isn't this Just how it always turns out over there?
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No, everyone we paid for at the very least seemed technically qualified for the job.
The problem was that several other companies were also paying them to work full time for them.
We found out, and one thing lead to another and they withheld all the work they had done on the project thus far.
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No, everyone we paid for at the very least seemed technically qualified for the job.
Did you verify this? Did you check with any of their other clients? Did you get examples of their work?
The problem was that several other companies were also paying them to work full time for them.
Did you set up delivery schedules? Did you send anyone to India to "sniff around"?
We found out, and one thing lead to another and they withheld all the work they had done on the project thus far.
Let me guess; you still got suckered out of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Due diligence - learn it.
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Did you verify this? Did you check with any of their other clients? Did you get examples of their work?
Did you set up delivery schedules? Did you send anyone to India to "sniff around"?
Le me guess... "Why should we? The outsourcing consultant who made a lot of money said it would be just like hiring local employees and we've never done any of that to our employees."
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turns into a bunch of imaginary billing by people with fake degrees and no experience and no communication so it ends up costing more and barely working but when you fire them you discover that the code is a twisty piece of crap with WTFs everywhere and it would be easier to start over from scratch.
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The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO (which along with its allies represented the First World), or communism and the Soviet Union (which along with its allies represented the Second World). This definition provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the earth into three groups based on social, political, and economic divisions.
Re:what did they expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
> 3rd world country by most standards
By all standards I believe. I don't think they backed the US nor the USSR during the cold war.
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CEOs don't care one bit about the cost of business.
Either you raise the price of the finished product and make the customer pay for the inefficiency, or you claim a business loss, and use tax loopholes to make the government pay for the inefficiency.
If that all fails, you can fire enough low-level employees to cover the inefficiency. and if THAT fails, you max out the corporate loans, write yourself a nice fat severance check, and disappear into South America.
The only thing a CEO cares about is whether or n
Re:Barely legible summary (Score:4, Funny)
Is it any suprise (Score:1)
about corruption in India? [wikipedia.org]
A tablet for 70 - 75 dollars in India (Score:1)
People seem to be surprised that Akash tablets are turning out to be failures.The cost factor was a big lie and so it will be revised.
There are tablets available for $70-$75 range.Take a look at olivepad v-tr200 specs.You will be surprised that its there and shipping.
Not that it ought to be good...but cost reduction is possible.
http://www.olivetelecom.in/laptop/olivepad/vtr-200.html
Short version (Score:5, Informative)
From what I can tell, they got the tender, did all the groundwork, then the group they were collaborating with came out with new impossible to achieve specs, backed up by the government, and their subcontractor wandered off to create a competing product.
What a pity, but it looks like they've been had.
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Sadly this kind of thing is all too common in India. A friend of mine was fool enough to believe it when he was promised all kinds of percentages and payments "in the future" if he'd help arrange investors for a project in India. He did his work, he made the contacts, and now most of the participants have signed on to side deals that don't pay him anything.
We warned him it was too good to be true. I'm sure people warned those who got into this $45 tablet debacle, too. But some people won't listen to
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Well hopefully it doesn't ruin any of the well meaning guys that tried to make this happen, dollar signs aren't usually stacked too deeply around $45 tablets! With any luck they can call it lesson learned and get on with their lives the wiser for it.
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Don't underestimate the profitability of hitting a billion user market in hopes of earning $1 per customer...
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well jeez it was just such an original forward thinking item that no one could have ever come up with ARM+touchscreen+android during all this time they have been dragging nuts getting around to it
DataWind (Score:2)
I don't know if it's fair to still call DataWind a Canadian company. Yes, it was founded in Montreal, but ... R&D is in Montreal.. management is in the UK.
Datawind were trying to sell junk anyway (Score:2)
This project needs to die, and die fast. It doesn't matter just how it happens, it's a colossal waste of money. Datawind were trying to sell awful junk for more than it costs to just buy a bit less awful junk from China. The Indian government department concerned is clueless about technology, from the minister all the way down.
Shameless self promotion, but very relevant: you can read my old blog entry about the folly of this project here: http://colourmeamused.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/4/ [wordpress.com]
The reason for poor
What is the BFD with an $45 tablet (Score:3)
Everyone touts it as the second coming, some great breakthrough etc. Well here's one for $55. $10 more? Yes. But with free worldwide shipping included.
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/454240700-7-Inch-Android-2-2-Tablet-PC-support-WIFI-3G-Android-MID-with-retail-package-8121-wholesalers.html [aliexpress.com]
+ thousands of other models.
People thinking a tablet is called an iPad and costs $500 or whatever and you can get nothing cheaper, should get a reality (or an Aliexpress) check.
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Actually here's a better model and $2 cheaper http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/439643437-Free-shipping-NEW-7-Inch-Android-2-3-256M-4GB-WiFi-Tablet-Pc-wholesalers.html [aliexpress.com]
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Oh, Wow! What a deal!
A device with half the memory that I needed to run a GUI-based Linux distribution over five years ago, and less storage space than my MP3 player.
This isn't a "product" anyone will find useful. It's a piece of crap that won't actually run anything worth the effort.
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The linked tablets have the exact same specs as the indian one mentioned in this story. So if you're going to diss the specs, you can start right with that one. And no, you don't run an old GNU/Linux distribution on these tablets, you run a tailored version of Android. Which runs pretty well with 256 MB of RAM.
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Which would kind of be the point: You can't get anything worth owning at the $50 price point.
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Which would kind of be the point: You can't get anything worth owning at the $50 price point.
The shitty tablet posted above has more power than my first dozen computers put together, and probably more RAM too. And I got real work done on many of those machines. You're full of shit.
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I'm bored, so I'll bite the troll hook.
A 1GHz PIII with 512MB of RAM takes nearly 3 minutes to boot and load to the point of being able to browse with Firefox with Ubuntu or Windows XP. Without hardware acceleration, the box is incapable of displaying video any faster than 4-5 frames per second when full-screened.
It takes a minute or two to load an office suite to edit a document.
Just because it used to be my primary work machine when I bought it does not mean that software bloat has made it useless
running the equivalent of Android it would fly (Score:2)
That 1GHz PIII is faster than a 1GHz Arm chip out now. It would *fly* with any of the smartphone/tablet OS's.
Remember, these things are not normally running full-blown general-purpose linux distros.
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Well, duh, running windoze and anti-virus, what would you expect? Try a lite Linux, there are a bunch of 'em. 512M? Puppy, or Bodhi maybe. No, not Kubuntu.
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Poor Country == Corruption (Score:3, Interesting)
Coming from a third world country I can tell:
The more poorer a country more corruption it has.
And please do not refute using 'per capita' income (the arabs country have higher 'per capita' but it seems only for the 'choosen ones')
Sad but true...
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"The more poorer a country more corruption it has."
In rich countries, we call corruption "government" and it's less visible due to being in cahoots with the people who also own the media.
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"The more poorer a country more corruption it has."
`In rich countries, we call corruption "government" and it's less visible due to being in cahoots with the people who also own the media.`
in rich countries, the rich manipulate the people into hating the government so that the corrupt wealthy can wire their money anywhere while the media cohorts make it look like the 'corruption' is just as bad as anywhere else. oh sure they'll mention the caymans or ireland or wherever when they really need to, but they al
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You have it backwards.
Corruption == Poor Country
Corruption? (Score:1)
Corruption? I didn't see any mention of it in either the two-part New York Times piece or the article linked from India's Economic Times. Or is it automatically assumed that when a project of this nature fails in India corruption has to be the cause?
DataWind was doomed anyways (Score:2)
"We had to send daily reports to the CEO, which would in turn justify our salary. Failure to do so meant a deduction in that days's wage," said a vice president, who resigned on the same grounds.
Any company that responds to crisis like that was never going to make it anyways.
Check the list of scandals in India (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_in_India_(state_wise) [wikipedia.org]
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My Transformer TF101 at $400 is really nice. It has ICS, and you can buy them now for $350 even though there's a new model out that has quad core. The iPad2 can be had for $350 as an Apple refurb. But those are 10" tablets, and the one we're talking about is half that size.
They don't need to make a ton of money on each one. India was looking to buy a half-billion of these tablets. And the maker would get to have the brand recognition as provider of tablets to all the students in India - and so sell th
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"If I see one more spate of unintelligible posts about Gamemaker from multiple accounts (at least 4) owned by the same jackass, I'm gonna slit my wrists."
Useless. Find HIM and slit HIS wrists instead.