15€ Pandora

[shideneyu]

Hi guys,


I got a stupid question. The main problem, is that by definition, my stupid question is stupid; However, I'm serious as hell :mellow:


Check this out, this is a 15€ India Tablet, intended to be sold for Indian students. It's name is "Akaash". (1130 Roupies)


It comes from with wifi, touchscreen, a ARM Cortex-A8, 1 GHz processor, 512mb ram, Android, and a 800×480 screen resolution.


Yeah, it got 3x less battery than the Pandora although (3hours).


Here is the wiki page and a good press article.


Okay, I tried to buy it, the main problem is that the commercial price is around 50 euros. After having investigating, I found that there is a subvention of about $20 (~= 16€) coming from the Indian state.


This is the most famous case of the upcoming cheaps tablets wave.

However, when we are an expert of the deep commercial web like me, we should know very well websites such as Chinavasion, Alibaba, or DHGate. Nowadays, chinese tablets which got these same specification cost around 70€.


Why am'I talking about all this, and what is the logical link between this and the title? I was deeply wondering "Have I made a big mistake one year ago when I bought my Pandora for 350€ (from a member of a forum) ?"


Today, the Pandora is aging. No, I'm saying it wrong. It does aging too much. I'm a bit confused and really deconcerted about all that. A tablet is fairly cool, excepting the lack of physical keyboard and joystick.


Today, if we don't put android in our pandora, the lightest browser I got (Midori) on Angström takes approximately 10 seconds to fully charge, and I can't have more than a few tabs If I don't want my Pandora (not the 1Ghz version) to lag as hell.


I love my Pandy'. The design is so sweet, I don't need a big screen, and the mouse control is awesome.


But it is too slow.


I love linux. I use it for 4 years now, and I use it in a single boot on my main computer. I would like to fully customize my Pandora using tools such as Aircrack-ng, Metasploit, developping in Ruby in it, getting the 'Mate' desktop environment instead of xfce... But I can't! I spent almost 3 days a year ago getting a usb 3g key working (and creating a wiki page) . Everything takes so much time and isn't as user friendly as expected...


I think having a tablet can overcome everything. It's price is up to 10x cheaper than the Pandora. I won't say the reasons, because EvilDragon, Craig and the team are doing an awesome work.


To conclude, time to speak about the logical relation with the title. I think the Pandora price should be reworked.


The components should be supplied by the same suppliers as the Akaash ones. Please don't speak about CC, I don't want that the OpenPandora team see such a misfortune again. However, I'm not speaking about an assembling and a factory company, but about the components manufacturers and suppliers.


I'm not speaking about the Pandora 2. I'm speaking about what should have been done. I'm not accusing anyone (by the way, I'm saying all this because I got a deep respect about the Pandora team, and also because they are running trouble after trouble, for something which looks like wrong for me), I just wanted to get a light about what do you think about that.


I'm seeing red when I see that the Akaash can nearly do the same things that I'm doing right now with my Pandora.


Thanks you for having read everything guys.

 

[PokeParadox]

But no gaming controls or keyboard...

 

[TrashyMG]

This tablet won't be fantastically faster than the rebirth Pandora's and on par with the specs for the 1Ghz Pandora..


As for the price, it's not going to lower.. While these tablets are being put together by what is essentially slave labor in china for nearly nothing.. The Pandora is being built by well paid Germans workers..

 

[shideneyu]

Even if they are well paid, I don't care, it's not as we are contributing to exploitations of chinese workers when we buy chinese products.


Don't you know that if these chinese or indian worker get fired, they may not find a job as well paid as their formers one? They can eat thanks to that, it's not like if they were forced to work. They work because they want to work, and because they need it


Maybe it will be just as fast as the Pandora Rebirth, but for 400€, I would expect something at least 4x more powerful.


Concerning the game pad and keyboard, this is one of the only things the Akaash lacks.

 

[mcobit]

Also the Pandorateam can't buy 100000 processors, ramchips etc. at once. I think this is the main reason why these things can be so cheap.


They are intended to sell hundreds of thousands of units.


Come to think of it. If the Pandora sells 10000 overall consoles that would be much for them.

 

[F_Slim]

Aakash is first in a series of Android-based tablet computers produced by British company DataWind. It is manufactured by the India-based company Quad, at a new production centre in Hyderabad, with a planned trial run of 100,000 units.

This already answers why the Pandora can not be sold at such a low price:


1) It is not manufactured in India or China


2) There is no big company behind the project


3) In the end the total number of Pandoras that will ever be produced is not going to be even near the number of units they do just for the trial run!


It may be possible to lower the price at some point, but never to such a low level, since due to 1) and 3) the production costs are much much higher. Due to 2) there must be enough money coming in to finance the next batch of units, and at the same time there is a limit of units you can finance and handle (and you will not be able to sell much more units anyway).


Apart from that, reading a bit further down the wikipedia-article:

... frequent system freezes, poor sound quality, absence of support for all formats and inability to install free software available online were also cited by users.

tells me that you often get what you paid for.


Depends on what you want. I'm often willing to pay more for things like service, quality, to support a small company that can not compete with the price dumping of the big companies. Others just want the cheapest option and don't care what may be behind the price.

 

[klapse]

@shideneyu if you think the pandora can be built cheaper, build one with four of your friends and get back to us.

 

[erico]

@shideneyu , I quite see your point, but not only this gadget but many other big screen android chinese game/tablets are around for around 150$.


Check around the ´other console´ part of this forum for info and you see what you get, complains about sound lag, no support at all, fake controls, etc are common.


The whole price point has been discussed million times before, even Ed stated the actual price can become lower but not on the current situation, maybe sometime next year.


Refurbish pandoras selling with full guarantee are a good option if price is a must.


The conclusion on price discussion for me is that "it depends on your use of it", if paper and and pencil can do what you want, I would not even bother for a $50 tablet.

 

[b_o_b]

15€ Pandora? A tablet has no similarities with a Pandora. It is a totally different beast. I have seen tons of threads like this and it always starts with a cheap tablet or a cheap portable gaming device without keyboard. Not the same, you can't compare them.


Pandora is still worth its price because of its unique features.

 

[ghostpatch]

already have enough cheap junk -.-

 

[Binky]

The Pandora has to fit a fully functioning ARM motherboard onto one side of 8cm*14cm (several layers in between, but only one side available for major components)


That looks like it has four times the area to play with - no Idea if this affects price

 

[Exophase]

The thread title is misleading, since there's no real 15€ tablet.. like you say, it really costs over 30€ to manufacture and you just get it at that price because Indian tax money is subsidizing it. No one will sell you something at cost so the 50€ price you're seeing is really close to the bottom you could expect.


Pandora is expensive no real denying that, and I still think it's more expensive than it could be even for its volume. But it'll never be anywhere close to as cheap as a junky tablet like this.. people already mentioned the big reasons: low volume, higher workmanship costs, better quality assurance and support. But there are some subtler reasons why Pandora just costs more:


1) It's using an American made TI SoC and not a bottom of the barrel Chinese one like Allwinner A10. Some of these SoCs seem to be getting decent, but they still often have at least some compromises.. at the very least they tend to be at least partially behind in manufacturing process. In Pandora's case it's unfortunate that they have been kept back with old SoCs when they can get better ones for the same price, but they'll probably catch up more eventually.


2) It's using mobile DRAM + NAND on a PoP. This probably uses the cheapest (slow, power hungry) DDR2 RAM they can find, probably made of several 8-bit modules, and the storage is exclusively SD, probably including the cheapest (slowest, least reliable) card they can find.


3) Has custom nubs which cost extra money


4) Has twice the battery capacity which costs extra money


5) Probably has a much better screen which costs extra money - I really shudder to think what kind of low quality screen you get at this price. I wouldn't want to rely on a potentially awful digitizer for a touch-only tablet. Pandora's display has great power consumption, I wouldn't expect it from this.


6) Pandora needs custom parts like an LCD cable that is pretty expensive


7) Pandora has a quality audio subsystem with a good DAC/codec, amp, and acceptable speakers, these things cost more money


8) The more complex form factor costs more both in parts and time to assemble


9) The extra ports also costs more in parts


10) Much smaller board means it needs more layers which is more expensive


I think it's funny and bizarre that they're pushing so hard to get such a crappy low cost tablet into the hands of engineering students at universities.. surely their tuition and lab costs (whether subsidized or not) absolutely dwarf what a less bottom of the barrel tablet would cost?


If you want a gaming handheld that's bottom of the barrel cost-wise but still has some design input from people who actually know and care I suggest you look out for GCW-Zero.

 

[2bit]

Even if they are well paid, I don't care, it's not as we are contributing to exploitations of chinese workers when we buy chinese products.

Ahh , but we are , you see 99.9 percent of Chinese factories are like that or worse . If we ( I mean everyone with enough money to buy something half as luxurious as a Tiger R-Zone ) refused to buy Chinese goods until their quality and worker rights increased THEN they would have to increase the aforementioned things . And as unlikely as that is it COULD happen .

 

[elwing]

isn't this the third ridiculously low price hardware for india education announced? I think I'm remembering two other announcement made a few years ago... I believe this won't go anywhere too...


at least I'm certain you won't be able to buy em for 15$...

 

[mclien]

Even if they are well paid, I don't care, it's not as we are contributing to exploitations of chinese workers when we buy chinese products.


Don't you know that if these chinese or indian worker get fired, they may not find a job as well paid as their formers one? They can eat thanks to that, it's not like if they were forced to work. They work because they want to work, and because they need it

Companies try to legitimated ALL slavery in the world. And from point of view, to agree upon that is unreflektive, akward and therefor pointless.


(And yes, I try to avoid such products or abstain from products like this products)

 

[palstyo]

It comes from with wifi, touchscreen, a ARM Cortex-A8, 1 GHz processor, 512mb ram, Android, and a 800×480 screen resolution.

Well this specification is not suitable for run ICS so I think you waste your money to buy this.

 

[mcobit]

Why is this not suitable to run ics?


It ran on my hd2 quite well...


Also its on the experia arc which has similar specs.

 

[Inferno's Reaper]

The Pandora has a USB port, 2 SD slots, the ability to connect to my laptop to access said SD slots, 2 different charging inputs, a full keyboard, a game pad, resistive touch LCD(so you can use a stylus), a stylus, the ability to fit in a jacket pocket, & around 10 hours of battery life(even the older ones seem to keep fairly good life). I can use Android(for the most part) as well as the default Linux OS. Thanks to the hard work of the various software developers, there is a good bit of software for the device, such emulators, android, office applications, & programing applications. These things do not work as well as I'd like, but are surprisingly effective for being free. Obviously, it would be nice if the software support were better, but it's really amazing how good it is right now.


I like to compare the Pandora to an Apple product, rather than some cheap Chinese thing of highly dubious origins, quality, & support. A reviewer on youtube called Ashens has covered both the Pandora & some cheapo devices that are meant to do similar things.


That said, I will compare it to products from Taiwan as well, such as my friend's Asus Andriod tablet and its docking station with keyboard, which cost about the same as a Pandora. Obviously there's a difference of screen size & the dock gives the tablet a bit more battery life, but the Pandora is far more portable & just as functional overall. The biggest weak point of the Pandora is Flash support, but that is a weakness shared by both Linux & Android now.


Now, if you only want a portable game console then get a modded PSP with emulators. That's your best cheap option. If you want a pocket PC that can play games & do some office work, then the Pandora's one of the better options, even if it is somewhat pricey. There are other options, though, so you may want to look at some of those as well &, if you find something you like, sell off your old pandora to help cover to cost of the new system.

 

[palstyo]

Why is this not suitable to run ics?


It ran on my hd2 quite well...


Also its on the experia arc which has similar specs.

I know it's working but not smooth as I feel.


I have Xperia acro which has 512MB but can't use full of 512MB coz. it takes by system apps.


That's why quite slow and it always insufficient memory.


In Japan Sony didn't upgrade to ICS coz. of memory problem.


Finally I decided to change it coz. too frustrated(very slow response, freeze etc..) especially use as my main phone.


Now I'm happy to using HTC J which has snapdragon S4 dual core with 1GB RAM.


May be I have many Android devices(more than 10) that's why I think like that but not attractive for me.

 

[2bit]

I jut realized an ironic truth : Products like the Akaash are made to help students in their education so they can get non sweat factory jobs . Or at least be the super intendent of a sweat factory . However for these devices to be sold to students in poverty they must be made - in a sweat factory . Double Facepalm . True if each of those sweat factory workers saved and bought their children one it would SLOWLY reduce the number of people in poverty but if this device was really successful it would temporarily INCREASE the number of sweat factory's needed . And even then they would need Internet or at least a tea shop with wifi for the kids to do online research or download apps . Don't forget that a lot of apps cost money .