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.

Comments

... and you poke at it...

[Anonymous Coward]

From the FAQ:

Q: How do I enter text? Can I attach a keyboard?

A: There are two options on the base simputer for entering text: one is a soft keyboard, that can be brought up on the touch screen and you poke at it to enter one character at a time...

I guess they took it to the point that that even the description is simplified. :)

Cheap, but is it enough?

[syphoon]

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.

Re:Cheap, but is it enough?

[The Cydonian]

Not to karma-whore, but just a few additions/corrections (I had posted earlier on the scripts; now including stuff on grammar as well here) :-

• The official 1961 Census listed 1652 "mother tongues".
• Another report suggests that there are 418 "listed languages"
• However, there are 18 (not 14) constitutionally recognised languages.
• Anthropologically speaking, there's little similarity between *most* languages except for geographical proximity; for instance, folks speak Gujarati, Siddhi and Indo-Portuguese in and around the islands of Daman and Diu. It's interesting to note that these languages have derived themselves from Aryan, African and European roots respectively. Very little overlap, historically speaking, but these languages are spoken nowhere else, hence are uniquely Indian.
• But despite all this, there *is* a certain amount of overlap. There are 10 uniquely Indian (as opposed to Indic; Indic would include scripts such as Burmese, Thai, Tagalog and Sinhala as well) scripts which are all derived from the 5th century Brahmi script. A fact that was already researched and recorded in C-DAC's masterful ISCII (Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange) format, which, as I understand, treats each individual language as a specialisation of an existing meta layout.
• It is my contention that the basic grammar for *most* prominent constitutionally recognised languages is inherently same; the grammatical difference between, say, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Urdu and Kannada is noticeable, but not significant.

Bottomline: I'm an NLP researcher myself fascinated by languages (see my sig). As much as I'm excited by this project, I really think we shouldn't kid ourselves, coz:-

• 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.
• 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.

Average montly salaries

[Drunken Coward]

The average monthly salary in India is somewhere along the lines of $37. A person earning that much could hardly afford the luxuries of such a handheld, even if it could be attained for the paltry sum of $200. Pennies to us, but to them it could take a lifetime to acquire that amount of savings. Until we work to attain far cheaper methods of building computers, these people will be unable to experience the very joy we take for granted. Of course, this is a noble effort and no doubt will further number of Indians able to participate in the IT field, but further effort is needed.

Re:Average montly salaries

[rovingeyes]

Well, even though the average monthly salary might be low, you are forgetting the point that even if 2% of more than a billion population plan to buy (believe me there are people india who are filthy rich) it'd be lot more than the simputer guys could hope for. Certainly you can look at it this way - IT IS A START!

Re:Average montly salaries

[Albanach]

By reading the FAQ you would learn that the simputer has been designed for sharing by communities. THe examples they give are schools and community centres which are already established as places where shared resources are available to comunities.

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:Average montly salaries

[arvindn]

Pennies to us, but to them it could take a lifetime to acquire that amount of savings. I live in India, and I what you say is simply not true. You're missing the point that not everyone earns close to the average salary. An Indian "middle class" family (such as mine) could easily have an income of Rs. 50000 ($1000) per month. (That's > 25 times your average!) True, the percent of affluent people is small, but in a country of a billion people its still a large number. I don't mean to troll, but slashdot seems to have the general attitude that India is still a country of snake charmers and tightrope walkers. Get over it. While a majority of the population lives in poverty (and consistently gets screwed by self-serving governments), there is also a large, educated, wealthy technically minded workforce.

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.

from the FAQ

[jas79]

Q: Can I create a Beowulf cluster using many Simputers?

A: You must be a /.er; in which case you know the answer!

A few things about India

[panurge]

First, India has a big educated middle class. Over 100 million people. They don't have the sort of incomes we do in the West, but a $200 handheld is within their possible budgets.

Second, India has huge potential in IT as their materials-poor economy has encouraged education in mathematics and other subjects which do not require expensive learning facilities - you do not actually need a computer to learn computer science, but it sure helps.

Third, India cannot afford lots of imports from the US, Korea or Japan. They need to be self-sufficient (even if it wasn't one of Gandhi's principles).

Fourth, the demand for such things is enormous. Believe me, I once thought I was going to find myself in prison in Mumbai because I had an HP calculator and a mini circuit tester in my luggage ("Admit, you have brought these to sell on black market")

Fifth, even poor Indian villages have the odd educated person who will provide services for the locals - and such people would benefit enormously from a handheld. The idea that every peasant should ultimately have a compactflash/smartmedia card with all their own information on it, is actually a hugely enabling one in a subliterate culture because it allows them access to a personal store of information. If it has to be retrieved by symbols on a soft keyboard and text-to-speech, does it matter?

Unfortunately, looking at some earlier posts, India and China are far from having a monopoly on illiterate peasants who don't know what goes on in the rest of the world (flamebait)

Available outside India?

[Ed Avis]

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).

Simputers need not be for an individual

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A couple things

[gralem]

First: IML stands for "Information" ML, not "International" ML.

Second: The product is not shipping, it was just presented by the IT Minister of India. No shipping date has been set by any company. Aparently the people at simputer.org do not build the product, they licence the hardware to be built. There are no listed manufacturers of the simputer.

It is not shipping, it is not available. (But according to the FAQ, it should be shipping by March 2002!) All said, the hinduonnet article is simple marketing fluff (ala M$, RH, etc).

---gralem

Please tell that to Malaysia

[Taco Cowboy]

Your message's title "IT doesn't replace education" is indeed very striking, considering that the government of Malaysia - a fifth-rate country, mind you - is on the path of REPLACING education with IT.

Specifically, the Prime Minister of Malaysia has commented on several accounts that,

"The teachers are mere facilitators. The main point
is the computers, where the students learn from. The
teachers just _help_ out if any problem arises."

Dunno what will happen to the children in fifth rate countries such as Malaysia.

keep making fun of India REALITY CHECK

[Meorah]

After all, that's where all your jobs are going... might as well have a few laughs before you find yourself back in college either getting a masters in CS or another BS in Mgmt or Finance.

http://www.bigates.com/html/Pdf's/Benefits%20of%20 the%20company%20you%20keep.pdf

I can't believe how many of you goofs actually think India is some 3rd world country. Just because they have a very large proportion of farmers and field labor who live off their own sweat and blood doesn't mean there aren't a ton of wealthy people, especially in the cities.

In addition, did any of you einsteins think that perhaps they'll be selling this device in Europe (where it was unveiled), Asia, or god-forbid, N. America? Yeah, I'm sure all the poor people in the good ole U S of A will have to take out a 3rd mortgage to get their hands on one of these badboys... what with spending their life savings building beowulf clusters and all...