Hardware
22,000 Netbooks Headed to Schools in New South Wales
Microsoft and Lenovo just landed a contract in New South Wales, Austrailia, that will see them providing 22,000 Netbooks to the school system there for $150 million. That breaks down to about $681 per Netbook.
Anyway you slice it, that’s a lot of Netbooks and I guess it begs several questions. Many of us in the Tabletscape kept wondering when we’d see large rollouts of Tablet PCs in the education sector similar to this one. With pinched budgets, lower priced Netbooks certainly become an attractive option, but in my mind, the small screen size, and I guess limited processing power of Netbooks don’t lead to the best creative solution.
Loren Heiny (I got this story from him) suggests that something along the lines of an interactive eBook reading device might be more conducive to both the creation and consumption of content. I’d have to agree.
But then again, it seems like the promise of Tablet PCs certainly offered all of that and more, but I think that day may have passed us by.
sbtablet
04/02/2009 at 12:38 pm
Seems penny wise and pound foolish to me. Children could do so much more with a tablet pc geared to their use.
Sara Fauzia
04/02/2009 at 12:45 pm
That’s just really terrible. You can’t do the real studying in laptop mode; I can attest to that as a student myself in college. Laptops are only good for word processing, powerpoints, and reading textbooks–even that I sometimes prefer tablet mode for. All of my little cousins (in school) have been absolutely impressed with the tablet PC; they find writing on it easier, and recognize how it’d make note-taking much simpler. One of them even quipped that it saves paper but wastes electricity! But that’s besides the point, of course.
I really want to see students using the tablet PC; I’m not sure if its time to shine has really passed us yet, as there’s still the opportunity to continue to educate people about tablets. I’ve told many of my peers about the tablet, the pricing–it’s a blessing tablet prices are now in more acceptable ranges. Especially when Lenovo was having some very good sales. So I haven’t given up my hopes yet… but I can’t help but feel that 150 million spent was a big waste. They could have purchased the Intel Classmate tablets for a cheaper price (500 dollars for one, I think?).
Nicholas
04/03/2009 at 1:08 am
You have to remember that the cheapest Tablet PC available in the Australian Market is the HP Touchsmart TX2 which is $2000 (AU) compared to the requirement of their Tender of $500 (AU) (i dont know if that was the final price paer unit paid).
I agree that Tablet PCs would be amazing in schools, but at these relatively high prices, it is hard to justify.
You’ll notice that these Netbooks will recieve updates to Windows 7 at the end of the year aswell!!