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India Officially Launches Simputer
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.
Its good to see low cost applications such as the simputer being made to help those who otherwise wouldn't have access to any such device. But I wonder, in a country as vast as India with 58 taught languages and 87 different language newspapers (http://www.abhishek.mybravenet.com/languages%20of %20india.htm), how effective would the speech recognition really be, especially when you take into account the lower literacy levels of the demograph its aimed at.
Yeah, the specs doesn't look too different from Compaq iPaq which has been out for more than 2 years now. However, it is quite a bit cheaper, and it seems like the point of this device is to bring computing to the masses. If you don't have reliable power... etc, PDA just might be the answer.
This is a really stupid waste of money.
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.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
perhaps. they can ditch the MP3 support. doesn't fraunhoeffer (or whoever licenses mp3 stuff) charge $1, or something like that, per unit, for hardware devices to be able to play MP3s ?
it's only $1, but, it's a start
So are these things going to be available in other countries? Assuming the software is available (and it's Linux, so why not) then this thing could stomp on the Ipaq and other more expensive handhelds. At least for price-conscious buyers such as schools (the old Psion Series 3 and 3a had some success in British schools marketed as the Acorn Pocket Book - and it's a lot cheaper to buy ten of these handhelds for a classroom than a couple of PCs).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I had attended a talk by Vijay Chandru (the no. 1 contributor to it) & they said their aim was not only to provide individuals with cheaper comps. but to provides groups of people as well.
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.
This thing takes three AAA batteries, are these readily available in India? In the US they cost a couple of bucks for a pack, so going by what someone else stated as the average Indian making $16 a month, they are supposed to spend 12.5% of their income on batteries?
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.
Given that there's a USB port and a phone port (powered by some sort of software modem), you have two choices to network your equipment. The real problem with clustering will be power -you'll have to hack each case with an adapter to supply 4.5vdc. A more elegant way of handling this would be if they allowed you to supply power to the simputer via the USB port (say, could you get enough current to charge your batteries?)
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...
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.
PCs can get into the $200 price range. Systems can be found for as little as $200 at Walmart (sans $99 15" monitor).
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.
The reason average income in India is so low is that the population contains many millions of very poor people.
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
... will be when China has ironed out all the bugs with their CPUs and software. Then you can forget
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.
It costs less than a Television in India. And there are tens of millions of Televisions in India. :-D
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
Yes, but a larger group of people might pool their resources and get one. I've heard of urban poor (note: not villagers) buying TV's/with Cable in India this way.
Someone (besides me) should get in touch with them and recommend adding an ogg player alongside the mp3 player!