Indian Android news site Androidos.in has broken the news that the $35 “home-grown” tablet touted by the government of India (and lauded by OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte) looks suspiciously similar (that is to say, identical) to Chinese manufacturer HiVision’s Speedpad Android tablet. AndroidOS reports that HiVision’s tablet was first seen at CeBIT in March, 2010, where it was predicted to retail for about $100. Androidos is not pleased by the discovery that this tablet, claimed to be the result of development at India’s top engineering colleges, has apparently turned out to be a Chinese import in actuality: ...

Just a couple days ago I wrote about an article wondering if the iPad had “preemptively killed the US tablet market”. It would seem at least one person believes the answer is no, because CNet is running a brief piece by Brooke Crothers predicting that a lot of media pads are on the way, and listing some of the features they might have. What I take from all this is that prognostication is really anybody’s guess. And speaking of prognostication, fresh from offering his $100 tablet expertise to the makers of India’s announced $35 tablet, Nicholas Negroponte...

Good Gear Guide posts an IDG News Service report that Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, has sent a note congratulating the Indian government on the $35 tablet it announced a few days ago, and has also offered India full access to OLPC hardware and software technology to help in manufacturing it. I can certainly understand why Negroponte made the offer. The goal of furthering world-wide education with cheap computers works whether we’re talking about a $100 XO tablet, or a $35 device from India. Still, I can’t help finding it a little...

A couple of days ago, Paul mentioned the skeptical reaction that a new $35 tablet device from India is getting within India, but as far as I can tell we never actually went into any detail about the device itself. According to a post from our sister blog Gadgetell (linking an article at The Guardian), the device will be Linux powered and come with 2 GB of memory, video conferencing capability, and a USB port. It can run on solar panel, battery, or AC power. PC World also has an article looking at the device, and...

Mike Lee at OLPC News has a photo and video comparison of the 4-year-old OLPC XO-1’s display, and the new Pixel Qi display based on the same technology. Lee said that he bought the $275 10.1” display panel when MakerShed had them available (they sold out fast) and put it in the Acer Aspire One netbook he had bought the month before for $199. (It seems a bit odd to me to pay more for a screen than for the netbook you swap it into, but on the other hand it does have some advantages.) Although...

And speaking of school libraries, NPR reported a few days ago that they are increasingly becoming seen as a luxury where school budgets are concerned. Since there are few laws mandating that schools must have libraries, they are beginning to go by the wayside as budgets dwindle. But librarians do far more than just check out books. They help students with research and information technology, such as the Internet—or even e-books. Students, especially those from low-income families may not have access to the resources they need to do their schoolwork at home. [Rosemarie Bernier,...

The New York Times has a brief article looking at the future of e-book devices, and their technological siblings the tablet computer. It includes quotes from Nicholas Negroponte of One Laptop Per Child, and Nick Colaneri of Arizona State University whose Flexible Display Center is working with the military to develop flexible displays for battlefield use. The group Mr. Negroponte heads, One Laptop Per Child, has developed a slate computer set to be released in 2012 that will cost less than $100. Plastic and, he said, unbreakable, the computer will resemble the iPad...

 When I first reported on Marvell Semiconductor’s $99 10” “Moby” ARM tablet, I mentioned that ARMdevices.net saw a parallel between that and the OLPC group’s goal of creating a $75 tablet device for their next XO device. It turns out that the OLPC group has seen that parallel as well. Ars Technica reports that OLPC and Marvell are partnering up to base the XO-3 design on the Moby. "Today's learning environments require robust platforms for computation, content creation and experimentation—and all that at a very low cost," [OLPC founder Nicholas] Negroponte said in...

I found a link to this video yesterday in Jimbo Wales’s post surrendering his editing privileges. Wales said it “moved [him] deeply” and was why he felt so strongly about wanting Wikipedia to be above reproach. I can’t speak to whether Wales’s actions were justified, but the 8-minute mini-documentary about a remote village in Peru is remarkably interesting. It includes some shots of students using green-and-white OLPC XO-1 laptops, and talking about how they learned to use them by exploring the applications. The students said that if one of them discovered how to do something new, he...

A Publishing Perspectives article about a Nigerian publisher hints at the promise that e-books might eventually have in Africa. Bibi Bakare-Yusuf and Jeremy Weate, who founded Cassava Republic in 2006 to publish books by and for Nigerians and those in the surrounding region, see e-books as a way to avoid the problem of foreign-printed books being held up in Nigeria’s infamous customs system—if more Nigerians can get Internet access to buy them. It might also help the company’s books become wider known, if the regional distribution rights problem can be solved. “The challenge at...

iTunes 9.1 has now launched, bringing with it the e-book-related matters I mentioned yesterday. I have not had a chance to take a look yet, but Gizmodo reports that all it does is keep track of e-books rather than read them. It does not seem there is a lot of point without an iPad. (Hopefully there will be an iPhone iBooks application as well, but since such a thing has not been mentioned, this is by no means assured.) Pennsylvania-based Seton Hill University, enrollment 2,100, has announced that all enrolled students there will receive an iPad as part of...

Worldreader.org is a nonprofit organization that is making Kindle e-book readers available to the developing world. (As TechFlash says, “Kind of like One Laptop Per Child, but with Kindles.”) It is beginning its first trial in Ghana this week. Says Worldreader’s website: Just as mobile phones have leapfrogged landlines in developing countries, e-readers can deliver books instantly and for far less: many e-books are less than one-third the price of a printed book, saving trees and reaching more minds. Personally, I suspect that a netbook such as the OLPC might prove considerably more...