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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!"
If you go by that screenshot, that thing must have 1280 resolution. You gotta love people who Photoshop screen mockups of web pages onto PDAs.
"Follow your Bliss." -- Joseph Campbell
In addition, the Simputer has a program called Tapatap that displays a three-by-three grid; you can input a letter or number by tapping on the squares of the grid in a particular sequence.
Welcome to interface hell.
Seriously, this idea probably won't fly. As they say in the article, mobile phones will be much more practical and cheaper, and given the user interface description (ok, only half the story, but anyway), much easier to use. There is little that this device could do that someone couldn't accomplish with a phone (except for, perhaps, teaching literacy, but can't you do that with picture books or cassette tapes or something cheaper?)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
It still needs to be shown that a collection of illiterate folks can get enough out of the device to make it cost-effective though. The article also mentions the difficulty in finding power for the device, but fails to mention availability of internet access. This seems to be an important detatil.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
This is not a troll just a question, but I fail to see a real advantage of this on the last PDA from Dell. Which does cost the same price if my memory serves Well.
The Indian Paysan with not really care if it rans Linux or not, the most important factor is the price.
I disagree.
A device that connects an otherwise isolated villager to the Internet could help with these other priorities, rather than detract from them. For example, it might expose people to birth control information who might otherwise not have it. How about information on treadle pumps or getting clean water? It might be difficult for the population to which the Simputer is targeted to get this information via nonelectronic means, for any price.
demi
Seems like this answers a real direct need...except for the markets contact, I'm not sure what the simputer offers.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Used Palms go for $20-$50 on eBay. You could get possibly 10 Palm PDAs for the price of one of these. So can anyone tell me why this is better than flooding the country with a bunch of old and obsolete Palms?
From the slashback article: "We are a poor country. We cannot develop operating systems and platforms on our own."
Hmm, seems like they are doing ok in this instance.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
Yes, and my thought was, hmmm.. how much does a sybian-based phone with keyboard, color screen, text messaging and multi-protocol phone go for these days? By the time these folks are up and running the Nokia 9210s and their less-expensive cousins will be getting down to about the same price range.
Hey, the Simputer people *sorta* have their hearts in the right place, but capitalism will be providing this stuff just fine in a few years anyway.
They'ld probably be better off buying up tons of old Palms and Newtons with some of their millions and using them to get working computers out there NOW rather than creating yet another platform. People seem to forget that an *authorized* licence of pretty much any non-Microslime OS can be had for five or six dollars in quantity if you're willing to get stuff a few releases back. What do you think copies of Mac OS System 6 are going for these days? Wanna bet that there isn't some school out there that converted to Windoze years ago and would sell them for the cost of shipping?
Looks a bit like hubris to me. Kinda reminds me of when Brazil went into the car manufacturing business.
Wishing the people of India well but doubting that a non-profit, NIH-obsessed bunch of do-gooders is the way to go,
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Yeah, a normal phone system and pamphlets at the UNDP outpost wouldn't work at all for finding out those things.
Actually in most cases, no it wouldn't. Supply side control is always less efficient at supplying information than demand side. Would you want somebody deciding for you what you wanted to read?
Back in the Fifties they started having what we would now call black studies sections in urban libraries. But all of them were stocked by librarians elsewhere who first decided what "those Negros" would want and then sent it to them. It wasn't until I think, 1970, that a hippie librarian (well, actually, my mother) put together the funding to get a city library located in an SRO (single room occupancy hotel, i.e. fleabag) in a black neighborhood and ask the local library users what they wanted.
Surprise, surprise! they wanted entirely different stuff.
We all are so fiercely protective of our freedom to use the Internet as we choose, not be questioned about what we check out at the library, and so forth, but somehow when it comes to getting information to the truly desperate, we turn patriarchal (matriarchal?) and assume that we should decide for them.
Give 'em tools. And step back.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
I agree with you, arbitrage is cool, but you will find that it is difficult for people to bypass the existing middlemen without information.
As for other uses of IT, I'm a firm believer in GIS. Land ownership is often somewhat questionable and it is and avantage to everyone knowing who has what, and what the government thinks it is providing. For example, did that water pipe that the Govt think it has provided really ever get built? If the people know of the plans, they will make sure that things happen rather than let it dissappear in corruption.