Scientific American Reviews 'Simputer' PDA

Bill Kendrick writes "The 'Simputer' (Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual Computer), a Linux-based PDA developed by the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, and released a few weeks ago, has been reviewed by Scientific American, and they seem to like it!"

Comments

A Noble Endeavor

[m.lemur]

but the final paragraph of the article sums it up perfecly:

Perhaps the greatest obstacle for the Simputer, though, is cost. Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential? When so many communities in the Third World still lack clean drinking water and adequate medical facilities, are computers really a priority?

Re:A Noble Endeavor

[pe1rxq]

Just feeding the starving isn't going to help much.
You need to find a structural solution.
Besides there are plenty of places (e.g. India) were starvation is not the biggest problem, but lack of education. And there things like this will help.
You instantly get all the knowledge from the internet (insert porn joke here :) for free.
E.g. a farmer could learn himself the latest new techniques for increasing the amount of crops...

Jeroen

Re:A Noble Endeavor

[MyHair]

What I found interesting is that in that paragraph he pooh-poohed the $250 community device with simple-to-understand user interface (his description) and text-to-speech capability to help the illiterate and suggests that high-end text messaging mobile phones may usurp its purpose.

Cellular phones aren't cheap. We Americans think they are sometimes, but try to buy one without signing up for a year of service. They are US$300-US$500 last I checked (Nextel Motorola i500's and i1000's at Office Depot w/out service). That figure doesn't necessarily fairly compare with the quoted $250 for the Simputer because my cell phone price is USD in a US retail store and they will likely be much cheaper in the "developing world", and I presume the quoted $250 for the Simputer would be the "developing world" price.

Plus a cellular phone requires an ongoing expense. Depending on how they set it all up, they may pay a relitavely high price for the phones and low price for service or vice versa for one to offset the other, but I doubt this solution will be much cheaper than the Simputer even if they share one mobile phone for text messaging.

Re:A Noble Endeavor

[MrResistor]

Many of the poor parts of India are kept poor by their lack of information access. For example, they are unable to obtain information about the going price for rice, so a distributer can come in and buy their rice very cheap, and the farmers don't even know they're getting screwed. When they can get a decent price for their rice, then maybe they will have enough money to start taking care of things like clean running water on their own. Giving handouts and taking care of peoples problems for them is always a second rate solution. Self-sufficiency has to be the goal of any program designed to help the impoverished, and increasingly, even in third world countries, self sufficiency is dependent on education.

Re:A Noble Endeavor

[nelsonal]

Great now we will get "spanish prisoner" scams from India and other countries as well. : )
While they mention that it could be used to check government papers, and commodity prices, I have to wonder if this will truly be useful. I would be surprised if the grapevine isn't pretty accurate in relaying crop price info, and how often do you need to access government documents in a country with per capita income in the $100 per year range, you probably still have to travel into the city to bribe the official to get what you want done anyway. These simputers seem pretty pie in the sky to me, but if they really do improve lives more power to them. It seems to me this money would be better spend on water purification, literacy programs, or other human capital efforts.
A better solution would be to eliminate crop subsidies in the US, Japan, and Western Europe and buy our crops from these countries. They would cost less, and cut our tax bills. I realize it would eliminate many jobs here and in Europe, but it would save consumers more, and I'm sure a US cotton farmer can find another job better than an Indian, African, or South American sugar, corn, or cotton farmer. It seems odd to me, that the poorest farmers in the world are generally taxed, while the richest farmers recieve government aid.

Re:A Noble Endeavor

[ryochiji]

> are computers really a priority?

Give someone a fish, they get a meal. Teach them to fish, and they'll feed themselves.

I think the same concept might be applicable to computers in developing and/or oppressive nations. Information is power. When empowered, people can do far more than get water.

Someone's going to say, "But look at China and the Great Firewall". Yes, as things stand now, the internet and computers don't empower people to the fullest extent. But when the internet becomes truly decentralized (so that something like the Great Firewall becomes impossible) and computers become cheap enough, don't be surprised if there are changes on a global scale.

Re:A Noble Endeavor

[mysticgoat]

Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential?

Alice is a shrewd 17 year old who plans to build on her investment in a Simputer and a cell phone until she achieves world domination. With the optimism of youth, she figures that will happen when she's about 25. After all, she needs two years to pay off the Co-op loan she took to get the things, and then she needs to really learn how read and write, too. That might take a little while. But she's willing to put off starting her family until she's 25. Much as she wants kids, she wants to be rich, first.

One of Alice's clients of the day is Bob, who is a 28 year old who has a full set of socket wrenches, a number of other tools, a backpack, and an excellent memory of the exploded diagrams of the half dozen different types of Briggs & Stratton engines that are in use within walking distance. Today he brings Alice a broken fan belt from Chuck's rototiller. With him helping her figure out the part identification code, Alice is able to find a store that has a replacement in stock, fifteen miles-- a round-trip walk of only a day-- away. That's much better than the fifty mile trip to the city.

Chuck, who tagged along with Bob in a very worried fashion, is delighted at this good news. Three years ago his tiller had also broken down in the middle of planting season, and it had taken a week of sending a runner around to the distant towns to find the needed part. A week without work had thrown off the usual schedule, and while his farmer clients understood these things happen, some of their wives were angry at him because their kids had to be pulled out of school to hoe the fields, and those families had become the butt of village jokes for months. Nobody likes to be called "old fashioned", not that way. Chuck had lost something much more important than just the loss of income in that debacle, and he did not want to repeat it.

Alice, the shrewd businesswoman, suggested that if Bob and Chuck wanted her to, maybe she could try to broker a delivery deal and get the new belt into Bob's hands before noon. At first they thought she was joking: same day delivery, better even than the mythical FedEx! But after a few minutes of enjoyable haggling, the three agreed to a payment. Then Alice chased them out of hearing distance, while she did furtive things with the internet access and the cell phone. No, I won't reveal her trade secrets, so don't ask me. Something about a regional network of teenage girls with Simputers, but you didn't hear that from me.

The upshot was that 10 minutes later Chuck started sloshing across the western marsh to the highway, where he was to flag down a Frito Lay delivery truck heading east. The driver would give him the fan belt, and also a dozen batteries and a bag of potato chips for Alice. Meanwhile, Bob went back to the rototiller and began removing cover plates and things that needed to come off before the new belt could go on.

End of story: Chuck is back in business before the day has even started to get hot. Bob's reputation for fast, friendly, quality field service is even more enhanced. That evening Alice counts the day's take with a laugh, and then gently tells her latest suitor that no, she's not yet ready to marry. There is a world out there and she is going to claim her piece of it. Marriage and children have to wait awhile.

Design sucks!

[tomhudson]

Although the Simputer can run on three AAA batteries, it can operate for only a few hours before draining them. And in the developing world, even batteries are expensive and hard to come by. </quote>

AAA batteries cost more than AA batteries, and provide a lot less juice.

Stupid design flaw, right off the top.

Solar panels and a ni-cad power pack would be cheaper in the mid-term, and environmentally much more friendly. There's more ... just read the article.

Sounds very expensive.

[stevejsmith]

$250!? For a poverty-stricken Indian farmer? You have got to be kidding me! Some make this much in six months! I don't think I'd starve for six months to get a "Simputer." It seems to me that it would be smarter for the village to buy a cheap-o computer of two. You can get an okay computer with a monitor for $500 ("okay" is a relative term, but what are a whole bunch of internet-challenged Indians going to do with a 3.06GHz computer? All they need is a simple Pentium II and a 15" monitor)...arguable five times as good as the "Simputer." And regarding power: why not sell a solar adapter?

Even more important as an enabler

[jki]

for developing "niche" applications, aimed for specific ltasks. I don't believe Simputer alone does any magic - but it is the corner stone for providing the exact tool for exact needs - such as for creating an application for increasing milk productivity. You would not guess how complicated (and important) issue something like that can be. There are zillions of cases like this which could be solved with very simple (and intentionally very simple) applications. Before, it was just impossible to have that application reach those in need.

literacy

[cristipp]

Many of these potential users are illiterate...

Spend the money for a literacy program in the first place.

crazy

[minus_273]

250-300? for that thing? WHY? This is such a dumb idea.
More over, if you are illiterate and poverty stricken, how do they expect you to pay for this?
Middle class i could understand, but the middle class might was well get a DELL or Ipaq.. much better for less
looks more like a national pride thing than anything else. Sort of saying.. yeah.. we can make PDAs too! tisk. pretty sad if you ask me.