ARM Community: ARM Technology-Based Education Tablets: A big hit at CES - ARM Community

The tablet is still one of the hottest products at 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Education tablets based on ARM technology and Android are attracting considerable attention. We were fortunate to meet with Jun Liu, the CEO of Shenzhen Scope, when CES opened on Tuesday. The company has received much attention because of an important education tablet deal – One Tablet PC per Child (OTPC) – in Thailand in 2012. (Bangkok Post published the news in June 2012.)

Few people know what the deployment actually is. According to Jun’s update, Shenzhen Scope has deployed 900,000 OTPC units to the primary schools in Thailand in 2012. The government’s tablet specification consists of a seven-inch display, a 1GHz dual-core processor, 512MB RAM, 16GB storage memory, wireless LAN support of 802.11b/g/n, 6 hours of battery life, and it must meet the Federal Communications Commission’s safety standards. The current products are powered by Rockchip’s SoC chip, which is based on the ARM^® Cortex^TM-A8 processor. These devices cost about USD$80 – a seeming bargain given the functionality on these impressive devices.



Jun Liu is very positive about the ARM and Android combination in the education market. He says the main reason is that ARM partners can deliver cost-effective, full-featured, easy-of-use products to schools and educators, at price points that work well for developing countries. Previously, these markets were served by notebooks or netbooks. As these products are traditionally more expensive, power hungry and relatively heavier, there’s been a low penetration rate.


Shenzhen Scope Education Tablets (CES 2013) - Chinese

Jun Liu says the demand for learning devices is very strong in both school and home education markets. According to the statistics of UNESCO, there are about 1.5 billion kindergarten-to-grade 12 students worldwide. But the number of learning devices in classrooms runs between 10M and 20M units in total –- a penetration rate of about 1%. Including the devices for teachers, the yearly increment in education tablets at school education market can reach 10 million units by 2015, which is a great market for partners who focus on education market.

Right now, it is hard to calculate how many education tablets are purchased annually by households worldwide. But the top priority of many families around the world is to ensure that their progeny have a better education and greater opportunities than they themselves had. Nearly half a billion families joined the ranks of the middle class in the past decade, and many of these families will use their improving financial resources to invest in education tablets boosting the home education market.

In 2012, other ARM Partners – in addition to Scope - started to widely penetrate the global education market. For example, Amlogic shipped over half a million unit education tablets to Brazil; Allwinner designed devices for the India education market; and Nufront is working with education partners in China. As the price of the tablets falls, tablet-like mobile learning devices will become increasingly affordable and accessible. Therefore, many educators believe ARM technology-based devices will become more and more popular in education markets, and transform education around the planet.

Andy Chen, Client Computing Marketing Manager in ARM, is based in Shanghai, China. He is mainly responsible for ecosystem enablement and business development of computing market. Prior to joining ARM, Andy worked at Intel for many years as technical marketing. He owns over 10 years of working experience in semiconductor industry with rich knowledge and in-depth understanding of PC, tablet, consumer electronics and mobile internet markets. Andy obtained International MBA (Executive stream) from the University of Hong Kong.

陈鹏是ARM的移动计算市场经理，工作地点在中国上海。他主要负责计算领域的生态系统和商务拓展。曾在英特尔工作多年，拥有10年的半导体行业经验，熟悉PC，平板，消费电子以及移动市场。Andy曾获得香港大学的国际MBA学位。