Get Ready For The Simputer

EccentricAnomaly writes: "CNN is reporting that the Simputer will roll out next month. The Simputer is a handheld computer running GNU/Linux starting at around $214 and is aiming to be an affordable computer for the third world that can be used even by the illiterate with its text-to-speech features. From the Simputer website: "The Simputer is a low cost portable alternative to PCs, by which the benefits of IT can reach the common man." Slashdot ran a story in May 2001 reporting the launch of the Simputer project." The same Reuters story is also found at the Hindustan Times.

Comments

Bizarre claim about Simputer...

[abbamouse]

The article quotes the designers as wanting to bring the fruits of India's software revolution to the poor. But the Simputer still costs more than a year's salary even for the average Indian. Imagine a $40K computer (US per capita income) being touted as a way the American poor could use computers! Even though the Simputer supports smart cards so people can share the device and store personal info on the card, I suspect this will merely make it affordable for (Indian) middle-class families rather than the poor. I suspect the poor would have more appreciation for clean water, reliable sources of electricity, a working health care system, and a food stamp program than a Simputer that costs more than a year's pay.

Re:Bizarre claim about Simputer...

[big.ears]

India is one of the regions where microloans were pioneered. These are small loans of $5-$10 at a time, mostly to women in small villages, to create small businesses. It sounds crazy, but it really works. Among the businesses you would expect this to foster in such places (like farming, weaving, pottery, etc.), one of the more successful sectors is cellular phones. A family will take out these microloans to help finance their purchase of a cell phone, and then sell phone-time to everyone in the neighboring villages. This not only brings money to the family that owns the phone, but by being able to communicate with their friends/relatives in the city, the local residents are better able to operate their own businesses.

It appears to me that this is the model the Simputer people are looking toward. They sell these gadgets (probably with financing) to one family per village, and it lets your whole village communicate with the village 100 miles up the road, probably more cheaply than the cell phone (you don't have to wait for the guy who owns the phone to ride his goat over out to the farm you are calling to talk to your business partner).

So, the price isn't that different from the costs associated with a citizen of the US starting his/her own business. It could cost $30,000-100,000 to start up a bar or restaurant, or car repair shop, a small farm, or many other retail businesses.

Of course, I've never been to India, so maybe someone from there can fill in the details.

Re:Bizarre claim about Simputer...

[metlin]

Yup, not just that, there's another very essential point.

Contrary to popular belief, there is a very very significant tech-savvy population of farmers and others in India.

I think it would be great if they could get information regarding the weather, crops, harvest and the like in a much more accessible forms. Right now, there are counters and phone centers who answer such queries for them, if the simputer could make their task easier, then what's the problem? The returns would be way higher.

And some poster had commented about illiteracy, that an illterate populace does not need such stuff. You know, you do not weed out illiteracy by saying, "Hey! You don't deserve this coz you don't read." You try and motivate people. And by the way, who the hell gave you this crap that most Indians are illiterate? In the southern state of Kerala, there's more than 99% literacy. There are a lot of states and union territories which boast of 90%+ literacy.

And literacy for us is a very different thing altogether, a lot of the so called illiterate people do math, but can't write and read. Why? Because that's the way the culture and the society is. A guy running a family businesss here just knows what he needs to, nothing more nothing less. Just that they've not had the opportunity to exploit their capabilities does not mean that they should not be.

And besides, I'm sure that the govt. would introduce subsidies and banks would gladly give loans to the needy. Already a lot of subsidies with really reduced interest rates exist for small scale industries by banks with both public and private holdings. With enough help from the govt. Simputer could be really made available to the masses. More than a geek or hacker to fiddle with, this could mean a whole lot more to a farmer or a fisherman to know the status of the weather and the crop. Think about it.

for all those questioning its use...

[univgeek]

Computers are, as all of you know well, extremely useful tools for management, getting information and communication. But, you ask, why is this needed for the poor?

Let me tell you one area where it could be useful. Many, many times in the past, there have been growth of some vegetable or fruit, in quantities much larger than usual. Normally this follows a period of scarcity of that item (perhaps due to some disease). Once the farmers see that the price of some particular produce is very high, all of them start growing the same. Note that farm holdings are extremely fragmented in India. So when the harvest comes in, compared to the amount available, there is little demand. Most of the produce just rots on the plant, as it cost of picking the produce is more than the sale price. I have seen this happening many times. Imagine, if you will, an index of areas of cultivation of a particular crop. This would not be too difficult to make, at least on a rough basis, say per village. If all the farmers could see this information, then they could avoid these periods of excesses and scarcities.

The above was just one example where it could be useful. There are some organisations planning wireless internet through buses!!! Every time the bus passes through the village, the people in the village could download information off the bus. So they would get 'up-to-date' information say twice a day. Since long distance phone calls are expensive, emails could and probably would be quite a killer app there.

Even now, there are pilot trials going on where eye doctors, remotely view the patients' eyes with web-cams and recommend medication or ask them to come for further diagnosis/treatment.

In this case, I truly believe that once this becomes popular, there can be very useful applications benefitting the common people.

Re:I know this is terribly Politically Incorrect b

[NeoCode]

Most of the people fail to understand that the small portion of 'literate' people in countries like India alone outnumber the population of several countries combined. That number by itself is very tempting to introduce a product of this kind.

And I'm really surprised everytime I read people saying "oh why would a third world country bring a [product/service] etc when they can't even feed their citizens". Sometimes it is best to help the people indirectly like bringing in a tool to help them learn and bringing new computer technology is the best way to do it.

India is the fourth largest economy in the world. This product is geared towards the the middle to upper class of the populace whose spending power is growing. And they are obviously educated. So this would make a good idea to bring a linux powered pda to the market.

Half a dozen applications for the simputer.

[vkg]

• Management of microcredit loan systems
  Microcredit loans (of a few tens of dollars, repayable by a group rather than an individual) are rapidly turning into a key aid strategy, but finding people to run the schemes and do evaluations for who should get the loans is difficult. A simputer application could help with data and loan application gathering, and keeping track of repayments. You'd essentially run the local microcredit loan office on one, or perhaps have a traveling bank officer.
• Medical expert systems
  Have been proven to improve medical diagnosis in trained doctors by respectable margins. Even a simple database with appropriate treatment instructions for, say, the 100 most common ailments in the region the machine is in, plus some first aid, could really make a difference. Particularly if it had a preventative medicine bias.
• Useful Science Education
  People do not know what they do not know. A simputer app which contained a basic science and appropriate technology education (concepts like germ theory, designs for things like fuel efficient cooking stoves), which people could query easilly, could be very useful.
• Email
  Dumb as it may sound. Just wait for the "Help, I'm 9 years old, live in Andhar Pradesh, and my family is starving because the harvest failed again. Please do something" emails to begin.
  More seriously, with email, and a little time, we could see things like pairing of western high-schools with third world villages - they have a question, the highschoolers find the answer for them and email it back.
• Trade
  Similarly, trade becomes possible once you have information, financial structures and transport of goods (and, perhaps, rule of law). There are a lot of skilled crafts people in India - wouldn't you like to be able to order custom-made clothes or furniture for a fraction of what it would cost for generica at the Gap or Ikea?
  Just amortize the shipping costs (by the container, of course) across a large enough set of trades and this begins to make sense.
• Mapping
  One problem in governing places like India, even in the most basic distribution of help to the poor, is inaccurate or incomplete data about what is going on in the field. If we do end up with a simputer per village at some point in the future, and people log events on the box, mining that data stream may tell us how to help ten times more effectively than before.
  It may also help the poor organize: PeasantDot.Org - where the rural poor get together to help each other out.

Microelectonics is the only thing I know of which has a sustainable exponential curve anywhere in it's makeup. If we can figure out how to make our current computer technology help the poor a little, as prices drop and the gear gets better, it will help a lot more. Fifteen years down the line, it helps hundreds of times as much, if the mapping from (price per transistor) to (human benefit) holds.

Even if it doesn't, making what we're really good at help the people with nothing makes a lot of sense.

Re:I know this is terribly Politically Incorrect b

[chris_sawtell]

To learn to read. It's got text to speech.

What will we do with it?

[acceleriter]

This is a mass market device with a low price point and decent capabilities, which would normally mean that we should hack it to run Linux. But it already runs Linux.

Does this mean we must r00t it and install Windows?

An african swallow or eruopean swallow?

[Graymalkin]

The Simputer is ridiculous. Its designed ostensibly to provide computers to people who can't afford computers and help people learn and communicate. There is not a snowball chance in hell it can effectively meet either of these tasks.

If they think they have a reasonable price for some third world country to buy for schools they are putting themselves on. A pricetag of a "mere" $216 in US dollars is beaucoup cash for some family in the middle of nowhere on a dirt farm. They'd be lucky to sell just one per small village let alone one per person. People would be better off buying anti-biotics or flu shots rather than one of these things.

They get cool points among Linux zealots for even mentioning GNU or Linux but in reality having Linux on it means very little. It's like having Linux on a TiVo, nothing the user interacts with is Linux-y so to the user they aren't using something called Linux. You don't turn on a TiVo and watch a Twilight Zone marathon rerun and think "holy peepants this uses Linux and it is so cool because of that", well sane sociologically adjusted people dont. The Simputer isn't going to win over a bunch of third world Open Source zealots or some stupid shit like that. The software running on the Simputer will be all they really know or care about with regards to the system.

Instead of a stupid idea like the Simputer they should have stuck with something like a Dreamcast. The late edition DCs had a bunch of components packed onto a handful of chips and Sega even had a DC on a chip worked out ready for fabrication. They intended to stick DC guts into DVD players like the Matsushita/Panasonic DVD capable GameCube. They would be much more flexible than some handheld toy that is itching to be dropped or otherwise lost. Plus it could hook up to a television which a place likely to have the ability to plop down $50 for a DC based console ought to have at least one television in town. A number of people could use the thing at once which makes it much more cost effective.

Educational material is easy to ship off to people, a CD or DVD can store instructional material in the form of animated or live action movies for people who can't read. A student's entire lifetime curricula could be stored on a single CD. A class of students could use a single CD-ROM for several years worth of education. Textbooks from elementary to a high school level (or whatever your local equivilent is) could be stored at HTML or PDF files or some other format friendly to your particular language. As for languages, a single disc could contain the same information in multiple formats so a bunch of people speaking different languages or dialects only need to buy a single disc. Using CD-ROMs rather than semiconductor memory cards is scores cheaper and people could afford to not only buy more software but multiple copies in case one ends up ruined.

The goal of the Simputer would be more easily met by a much simpler and cheaper machine. Its creators might have the right mindset but they don't seem to have thought through the implications of the hardware they developed. Even if there was some requirement for a portable device people would be better off putting tough rubber cases on a bunch of Palm m105s or Handspring Visors and handing them out to people.