India Officially Launches Simputer 197
aravind writes "The Communications and IT Minister, Pramod Mahajan, has launched India's indigenously developed low-cost handheld Personal Computer -- Simputer -- at an IT and Communication expo, SMAU 2002, in Milan. A low-cost handheld PC on GNU/Linux working through a browser for international markup language IML, priced at Rs9000 (less than $200). 200Mhz StrongArm processor, 32MB DRAM, 24 MB flash, touchscreen, speakers, USB, text-to-speech, MP3 capability ... " Look here for some of the previous stories we've run on the Simputer.
Cheap, but is it enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another PDA Device? (Score:2, Insightful)
IT doesn't replace education. (Score:3, Insightful)
India's problem are not people who don't know how to use a computer, India's problem are people who can't read or write at all.
What use whould such people have for a computer ?
I doubt seriously that it had Hindi speech recognition (Hindi is much harder to do than French or English).
So these people would be able to buy for a 2 years wages a high-tech doorstopper.
That's classic wasted goverment effort. How about building schools instead ? Or creating decent taxes to distribute the enourmous wealth of the rich to the poor one so that they can efford education or even a real computer in some time ?
But as always technology without meaning.
Re:In India, less than USD 200 IS A LOT ! (Score:1, Insightful)
it's only $1, but, it's a start
Available outside India? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simputers need not be for an individual (Score:5, Insightful)
In India, many village children (as well as grown-ups BTW) have never heard of comps. & even in cities. not many schools (incl. mine) have more than 10 comps. Those schools can instead invest on 10 simputers (for probably 1000 students!) which would be more cost-effective.
They also say they don't want hi-fi speech synthesiser/recogniser as to learn a language (which is what village students as well as other villagers are expected to do), that's not required. It's OK if there is no proper intonation. The villagers can probably learn intonation later on but learning to write/read something even in their native language is still a great breakthrough.
The major problem faced by them is discontinuation of StrongArm processors by Intel. It's obviously very expensive to design a processor for simputer in India today.
Speaking of reliable power.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of reliable power.... (Score:3, Insightful)
For those who get one of these gizmos, who aren't geeks, they'll just find a local geek to hook them up with the requisite technology. I expect the local village tech to build a side business supply them with a set of rechargable batteries, which he'll recharge at his shop for a fee, if there doesn't already exist a service like this now...
Re:Average montly salaries (Score:5, Insightful)
The simputer is equipped with a smart card reader which is intended to provide personalisation to the device. The aim is to reduce the cost of _access_ (that's the important bit, not ownership) to the device to that of owning a smart card, not of owning the device itself.
Think of being able to walk into a local library and borrow a computer for a day instead of a book.
Re:from the FAQ (Score:3, Insightful)
It's funny that they talk about client-server processes for the simputer, since it lacks wireless access (when I think of portable devices talking to other devices, I think wireless.) However, if you can implement a common interface for connecting to a network and charging via a common port (could USB work?), you could install ports all over the place.
With this kind of distributed computing in place, India could soon be home of some serious computational power...
Re:Average montly salaries (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the reason the simputer took so long to take off was that its creators initially focussed on the wrong market - the illiterate masses. No company came forward to mass produce it and only the intervention of the government saved it from dying out altogether. But now that it has gotten off the mark, I think there is a very good market for it out here.
Re:Speaking of reliable power.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't expect costs in developing countries to be equal to those in the US. Heard of Eastern Economy/Low Priced/... Edition of Books specifically for South Asian & nearby developing countries?
Form factor (Score:4, Insightful)
Based on what I've seen here, I imagine it would have been possible to develop a system in the $200 hardware price range with a 13" monitor. I'm curious to know why they didn't choose a larger form factor for the machine. The advantages of the PDA-style design are portability, power consumption, and a pen-based interface. The cost is a tremendous restriction in capability, and the requirement of developing properietary hardware. I imagine that portablility will also often be a negative, as the device is a handheld and its a fact of life that people drop things (of course, I'd be much less likely to drop my PDA if it cost me a year's salary).
These devices sound like a remarkable achievement, and I wish them nothing but success. But I am curious as to why they didn't go with a bit bigger of a box.
Re:IT doesn't replace education. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Average montly salaries (Score:2, Insightful)
Keep in mind, though, that India's population is about a billion: there is also a large middle income group in the country who could afford a $200 computer pretty easily. This group makes up a relatively small percentage of the population, but this still amounts to several million people
The real change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Intel and Microsoft having much sales in Asia and the rest of the developing countries. A guess would
be that a Chinese handheld would go for $50. China has the ambition of taking the lead in the IT
market in Asia and the developing countries... and I bet they will. And then slowly they'll move over
to take market shares in the developed countries... maybe with 'inferior' products, but it will all go the
way the car industry went. Once they get a foothold, they'll make better and better products and finally
pass companies like Intel and Microsoft.
Re:Average montly salaries (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Form factor (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IT doesn't replace education. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cheap, but is it enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd however, like to add a few points which I consider relevant
I absolutely agree that a lot of Indian languages have little or no relation to each other, but the truth is that a significant percentage of these languages can be traced back to a common root. For example, certain Brahmi-derived languages and Prakrit have very common grammatical rules, but are also very different in other ways.
As long as we can find a set of common languages which would serve the majority of the populace, it'd be great. Reaching that in itself would be significant achievement.
Regarding the differences in grammar, yes, you're correct. But look at it from the point of voice recognition. Malayalam and Tamil sound very much alike, and a person with the knowledge of one with absolutely no knowledge of the other can actually understand the other one. But the alphabets of Tamil and Malayalam are phonetically miles away, Malayalam has a alphabets that spell like Brahmi, look like Tamil ones and the lexicon has a lot of Sanskrit. Likewise for Telugu and Kannada. In fact, Kannada has grammatical rules that are pretty much like that of Sanskrit (there is a book called NLP - A Panian Perspective that discusses exactly these issues).
:-)
Well, as for what you said,
Let's admit it; computerisation of *all* Indian languages won't happen in our lifetimes. Denying that would be to deny India's mind-boggling linguistic diversity.
Perhaps not all of it, but once you have a large chunk of it, you'll realise that a lot of them are evolved dialects and can be traced to a series of common roots. Look at Urdu, Arabic script with Hindi, Persian and Arabic words in the North, while down south you have a mix of Marathi and Telugu words. So it may not be all that impossible.
Let me rephrase your statement - *Complete* computerization of all the languages will not happen, but basic computerization might just happen, however mind boggling that task may seem.
If you want to increase literacy in India, get your basics right:- increase the number of schools and increase their quality. Don't search for magic bullets. They won't deliver, even if they're tech-y stuff.
Hmmm.. I think the Simputer was originally intended more as a tool to help the farmers and the rural people, not to educate people. In fact, I fully agree with you that technology will not be the only saviour. But then again, tools equip people better. Don't look at the Simputer as the end result, look at it as a tool that'll ease your way into achieving it
Re:Average montly salaries (Score:4, Insightful)
ogg? (Score:2, Insightful)