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Indian Linux PDA For $300
raj2569 writes "Business Line is reporting that kaii (hand in South Indian languages), a Linux PDA to hit the market in Oct. Based on Hitachi SH7727 @ 160MHz, with 64 MB SDRAM, 32 MB Flash, 3.5" Colour TFT (320x240x64k-16 bit) and USB host controller, the device looks cool. The monochrome will be priced at $200"
With a specification and price like that, it makes the new Palm Zire look rather overpriced wouldn't you say?
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and not an artists conception would be nice...
I fail to see how people in India can afford to drop 200(or 300 if you read the title of the article) on a PDA, considering last time I was there, most of my familys electricity was turned off at 9pm. And while the website claims to be a low cost alternative for India and others, it does not include hindi as a native language(it must be developed).
...curries favour with the Slashdot crowd.
[groan!]
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Look out U.S./Canada/Japan! Is this the first of a flood of new products to come out of India?
Luckily for me, I believe in capitalism, and I say the more the merrier.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
I am less likely to purchase a PDA at $300 when the website is mostly "Under Construction".
.02
It has great features like MS Office compatible Office Suite (that I have never heard of), ability to Sync w/several OSs, and import info into PIMs like Outlook.
Problem is I didn't see a CF card slot (for wlan and extra storage) and the site itself being pretty much scary.
I would rather spend the money and purchase a new iPaq. Those are rock solid and have a long history of serving their users well.
That's my worthless
--Chag
It took over 10 mins to load, presumably due to /. effect, so here it is:
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Infomart's Kaii to reach out in Oct
Chitra Phadnis
BANGALORE, Aug. 19
AN Indian kaii (hand) will reach out to touch the global hardware market when Infomart, a Bangalore-based company, releases a PDA (personal digital assistant) to the developer community in October.
The hand-held device named Kaii will be the first PDA to be designed and developed in the country.
In an unusual reversal of roles, the hardware design for the product comes from India and the software comes from US-based Lineo. Kaii is based on Lineo's Embedix, an embedded Linux operating system.
Infomart is in exalted company. Kaii is only the second product of its kind in the world. The first one happens to be the Zaurus PDA from Sharp of Japan, which has recently become commercially available.
The Kaii is pitted against Palm Inc's Palm Pilot and Microsoft's PocketPC.
"We are low on prices and high on features," said Mr Devesh Agarwal, Managing Director, Infomart. While the commercial launch of Kaii may only happen sometime in March next year, he estimated that the monochrome version would be available "under Rs 10,000" and the colour version around Rs 15,000. (Sharp's Zaurus retails for $450.)
The "pocket PC at the price of a Palm" hopes to sell at least 50,000 units next year globally.
It will be more than a consumer device and is being targeted at the enterprise segment, Mr Matthew Harris, President and CEO, Lineo told Business Line.
Infomart sees potential customers in vertical markets such as insurance, where agents may need to carry a portable computing device. Compared to notebooks, which are priced upwards of Rs 70,000, the Kaii becomes a significantly low-cost alternative.
"We have very aggressive power management features," said Mr C.T. Arul, Chief Technology Officer at Infomart and the brain behind Kaii.
The multimedia Kaii is `double byte enabled', which means that it can support any language in the world. Like a laptop, various devices such as printers, keyboards, external hard disk drives and so on can plug into it.
The Lineo-Infomart partnership offers another unique feature - that of mass customisation. Users can choose hardware and components according to their requirements, bringing down prices further.
What's more, the Kaii could become much more than just a PDA. With the same hardware design, the screen can be customised to create wall-mounted information boards at airports and railway stations, according to Mr Agarwal.
It could turn into an Internet information kiosk or even a digital billboard (though a slightly expensive one, he admitted).
The original Kaii fits into the hand and is the same size as Sharp's Zaurus.
Infomart plans to contract-manufacture it through local and global partners. The second version, a wireless-enabled product with GPRS and GSM built into it, is on the cards.
Looks like Trolltech's Qtopia and Jeode Java
Just like what is in my Zaurus. The screenshot and specs confirm it.
According to the article, the monochrome version will be available for "under Rs 10,000" and the colour version around Rs 15,000. We are given in the Slashdot post the information about the Monochrome Version being $200 us.
.02
.02 = 300
:-)
Therefore:
Monochrome = 10,000
Color = 15,000
Or, if:
Monochrome = 10,000 x Y = $200
then Y =
And
Color = 15,000 x
So the color version of this handheld will be around $300 US.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Can you buy them at the Quik E Mart?
I wouldn't consider buying a PDA like this from a company who has 75% of the pages on their site "under construction" (animated gif and all) with pictures of their product being computer rendered 3-D models.
Come on people! Whether this is a real product or not, it doesn't look to me like it has a cold chance in hell of taking off, the company just doesn't look like they have their act together properly. The "Agenda" had their act together a whole lot more than this company and the product went nowhere.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
While the commercial launch of Kaii may only happen sometime in March next year, he estimated that the monochrome version would be available "under Rs 10,000" and the colour version around Rs 15,000. (Sharp's Zaurus retails for $450.)
It's good to know that the color version will be Rs 15,000 which is such a bargain compared to the $450 Sharp Zaurus, the 2,669 DKK (Denmark Kroner) Clie N760C or even the 78,903.50 SDD (Sudan Dinars) Palm m515.
but the real question is: does Palma Sutra come standard or would I have to download it?
A Sharp Zaurus 5500 doesn't sell for much more, being able to find it easily for about $340.
The Zaurus is also on the market today and has been out for a while, so has had a bit of public exposure.
Yes, I'm a karma whore. :)
Link
The site doesn't really look under construction, and the specs are on the Hardware page.
My issue is more the lack of a keyboard, I personally prefer to type, I can thumb key way faster then I can do Graffiti or whatever (all those years with my HP 200lx).
Why don't we see more computers like the 200lx, which was basically a miniature PC (8088 1+ megs RAM) that ran off 2 AA's for a month or more, with PCMCIA exspansion etc etc etc.
Look at this page, it says there what releases it's using. :-)
HTH
It doesn't seem like it is being developed for the Indian Mass market, read the specs. they haven't even developed Indian language support:
Multi-lingual Standard language is English. German and French can be built-in at no additional cost but will require 32MB flash. Multi-lingual support via optional language packs for Arabic, Chinese (Mainland and Taiwan), German, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Thai, and Turkish which is available in Open-Source and/or Commercial versions. Indian language support can be developed.
It looks to be marketed to English/French/German speaking countries. And yes I know most people who could afford this in India probably speak/read English, but you would think if you were developing for your own countries market that native language support would at least be considered (then again they speak a whole crapload of languages in India so which one do you do it in?).
...with a Linux PDA that cannot be done on a PocketPC or Palm?
Just curious. The main reason that the Palm Pilot kicked the Newton's butt (in the marketplace that is) is because it focused on business uses rather than trying to make it a computer. Linux PDAs could fall into the same trap if they don't focus in a similar way.
Microsoft realized this, that's why the PocketPC interface no longer acts like a Windows desktop like CE 3.0 did. If there's no compelling reason to use the Linux OS vs. PocketPC or Palm, this type of PDA could suffer a bad fate.
"Derp de derp."
This thing is pretty impressive. Truly, I only see one flaw.
/. uses for an icon is trendier than this beige/off-white case that this thing uses.
It's BUTT UGLY.
The antequated Palm III that
I'm still waiting for a PDA that comes in a titanium cae. Yes, I know I can buy one for $100 or so and put my PDA in it, but seriously... why make a geek toy that looks so ugly?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The slashdot story cites a launch date of October, but the Business Line article says the real launch date is around May next year. I think that gives them plenty of time to fix the under-construction pages on their website.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
Given that they want to keep costs down I would have thought that choosing ogg vorbis as the sound format rather that mp3 would have been a wise idea, but there goes!
I can't find the story on SlashDot but the same company was suppose to bring on this PDA for Christmas. They has created thier own XML language.
It looked favorable then, but they still only had about as much info on the old site as they do the new site.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
This PDA actually seems darn good. It is probably faster than the box I'm currently doing most of my work on, runs a good (both in quality and in alignment) OS, and has a standard USB port. A number of concers though:
1) Does it exist? Will it exist? Or is this a case of `will be released RSN'?
2) What do they mean by twice the battery life of current PocketPCs? Twice as long as all that they are aware of? Twice as long as all I am aware of? How long _is_ their battery life is all that concerns me. Well? How long? And is that idle time, normal usage (whatever that is), or 100% load time?
Then on to practical considerations...Suppose I were to buy it. Then, should I go for flash or SDRAM of both? I would say that flash is more energy-efficient, whereas SDRAM is faster, and doesn't wear (flash has only a limited number of overwrites, right?)
And finally, imagine a B...
---
What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind.
-- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Good Lord, I just poured hot curry down my pants reading that crap. You sir are truly blessed with words, why don't you run for governer in say... Minnesota?
It always seems PDA makers are moving towards more expensive items... $300 is still very expensive (at least to me).
I swore I would never buy a stylus-based input PDA because I know $200-$400 should get me a nice one with a thumboard (which I like).
Guess what. I gave in when I got a refurbed Palm IIIx for $39 CDN. At $39 I don't worry about it being broken, lost, stolen, whatever. And it has all the features I see me needing, because a thumboard is just a want.
I wish there were some people making handhelds with the kinds of features old Palms had in the $50-$100 price range. But that's just me... And probably quite a few more consumers.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
1) The picture is computer generated
2) Linux on the Kaii is under construction? I could understand that but
3) Java on the Kaii are under construction? Worse still
4) Application section is under construction...not to mention
5) Peripheral Information is also under construction
6) and most important...Developer program is also under construction....
3) and 6) is unacceptable for developers. Yopy and Nokia 92x0 release developers programs and emulators/developers model at least half a year before final launch. Unless they are as big as Microsoft which could single-handedly create a market for their products, even big corp like Nokia need a developer community to survive.
I think common handheld developers will see that this PDA is not even existed! This propaganda could be used to seek VC money and publicity, but it can't fool us geeks....can it?
>I've never been much for PDAs, mostly because I don't need one I never really had a burning desire for a PDA either until one day when I saw this huge pile of articles sitting on my desk that I had printed out to read later. I spent several months watching ebay and finally picked out a Casiopeia BE-300 that came in under my set price ($120 US.) Now I print out almost nothing and instead save copies over to my snyc folder and take them with me. It makes me feel better that my recycle bin isn't as full, I'm not stuck behind my computer for an extra three or four hours everyday, and with the backlit screen I can even read comfortably in bed after my wife has turned out the light. I do use the appointment book to an extent, but not exclusively. My primary tools are the browser and Mobibook. I will admit that for my specific purpose, the PDA is adequate but not ideal. The screen on most PDA's is a little on the small side, but certainly useable. I picked the Casio because I found the screen quality to be the easiest on my eyes (your mileage my vary.) Lately however, I've had my eye on the various Tablet PC's on the market. The wider screen appeals to me, and since 95% of my use is at home, or in a car (not while driving!) the extra size and weight is not an issue for me. If I could find a stripped down model that was wifi enabled and acted more of less as a slave to my desktop PC, with a small amount of storage for traveling out of range, I'd be in heaven. Crocuta
I've always wanted a PDA that's been dead for several thousand years and runs off of protoblood.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Woah. The Zaurus still goes for 460 Euros around here - for the Euro equivalent of 300 I'd already have bought one. :/
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Like (most likely) no case design yet.
Presumably they are still working on the innards.
The significance of this announcement is perhaps not that there is a 'product' ready somewhere.
Perhaps it is deeper than that... there are teams outside the US thinking seriously about how to design and build world-class systems like this.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Hate to be nitpicking, but "kaii" is "hand" in only the South Indian languages of Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. It's "cheyyi" in Telugu, the fourth (officially recognised) South Indian language.
More than mere navel gazing.
All the articles say essentially the exact same thing, which sounds like a press release that the company created themselves.
gimme a V
gimme an A
gimme a PORWARE
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Just, blame Kannada!
While the software side of things seems to be pretty similar to that of the Zaurus (Lineo Embedix, Trolltech QTEmbedded/Qtopia, Insignia Jeaode JVM, Opera, Hancom Office suite) there are some important hardware differences. Rather than any of Intel's StrongARM based chips they're using an Hitatchi SH7727[PDF] and are citing USB Host Control as a capability of the device. I'm an owner and big fan of the Linux-based Zaurus, but the SA-1110 leaves a lot to be desired when USB connectivity is concerned. It can only act as a slave device and the silicon has numerous bugs and conflicts with general USB support and the USB CDC Spec (just check out Intel's own docs on the chip if you want to check up on this). This causes great problems with connectivity. The SA-1111 companion chip adds USB Host capability and some other nifty features, but is not used in any Linux handhelds that I know of. It would also increase size and power consumption if used. It will be interesting to see how the SH7727, with it's similar approach to "handheld on a chip" functionality stands up against Intel's offering. It could end up showing the Pro's and Cons of these chips at the core of the devices more than the handheld as a whole. There's also more info on India's movements into the handheld market here
Read the article. It says "Operating System Lineo Embedix Plus Linux kernel v 2.4.2"
> Am I alone in thinking that there have been an excessive number of racist and stereotypical views posted on this story?
Yeah, that happens with any India-related things on slashdot.
> but this doesn't make it right, does it?
Well, I'm of Indian decent, and I live in the United States. In daily life, I've hardly ever gotten any of these kinds of "racist and stereotypical views". This being slashdot, which is pretty much anonymous, I don't really care.
I think it happens especially in slashdot because people are angry that IT jobs are being shipped to India. As an American developer, I could be angry too, but I'm not. This is how capitalism works. The cycle repeats itself over and over again.
The Indian immigrant community in the US is mostly doctors and software folk -- i.e. rich people. People might even feel they can get away with trash talking about Mexican immigrants or black people, but not the rich. (That's sad when you think about it.)
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I just bought a DVD player (lasonic band) that is barely even listed on the manufacturer's website (which sucks horribly) but it's still a pretty good dvd player (progressive scan, dolby digital decoder).
The problem arises when the manufactuer's website is the only place to see the thing, but if that's not the case or if they fix up their site by the time they actually have something to sell, it should be all good.
Life is too short to proofread.
It seems like it might be. It's (relatively) cheap, handheld, uses flash for storage, has usb ports, and runs linux.
The real important design differences are in software. Simputer FAQ. One of the big focuses of the Simputer was the IML information markup language, which is an XMLish application designed to be really convenient for multilingual applications, which in India means multiple alphabetic systems as well (so there's an input system), people with limited literacy, support smartcard media well, etc., and they've got some multilingual text-to-speech Kaii doesn't seem to have anything like that - their language support is English, with optional European , Arabic, and East Asian language support, and the possibility of developing something for Indian languages, and they're running a bunch of non-Indian-developed application suites. (There is Unicode support, at least.) The Simputer also has a built-in softmodem capability, which makes sense for something targeted toward the village computer market, while the Kaii lets you plug in standard cards, which could be modem, memory, ether, wireless, etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
See
my other Slashdot posting for discussion and/or speculation on differences.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Also, while the screen is still small, being able to add a USB disk drive and printer lets you make this into a real computer, not just an accessory device. Somebody else complained that it was only USB1, not USB2, and while it's not blazingly fast, it's more than enough to do real work. On the othe r hand, $300 (plus $200-300 for a USB disk) can get you a much more powerful desktop computer, if you don't care about portability.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm not sure, but this looks to be the same one that was featured in Scientific America... If not, please flame the hell out of me =D According to the article, it is targeted for 3rd world countries. It could be used for a variety of things, including education... It even works for the illiterate! It has a small speaker and will talk to you. Unfortunatly, it runs on AAA batteries, and only lasts a few hours... It is slow, applications are slow, and it takes about 15 seconds to boot. And if it runs idle too long, it is prone to crashing. It's not really targeted for the US tech junkie I guess, but it's still a pretty cool idea. Personally, I'm going to be bugging the hell out of my parents for a Zaurus =D
So linuxdevices will change an archived story? I can only guess that the company who makes it contacted them. WTF is going on?!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Kaii does mean 'hand' in Malayalam [which is the only language with a palindrome for a name, btw].
As for the pronunciation, just say "Ky" from "Kylie" [or "ki" from "Kinetic"].
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]