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Simputer Available?
Anonymous Coward writes "The Simputer (marketed by PicoPeta, the inventors and manufactured by the Defence Electronics PSU - BEL) has a website now and is available for sale (including outside India). Some pics can be found at the picture gallery. This story has been discussed a few times before here at /. here, here and here. Of particular note are some of the features, notably the device goes beyond the typical handheld/PDA and has some brand new innovations. For instance, it uses accelerometers to sense motion and this is used to give commands to the computer (for instance, to zoom a picture, you just have to move the Simputer towards you and to turn a page, you flick it like you would turn a page for a book. Also has an integrated smart card reader plus writer, very useful for several business applications."
Although I don't have the problem yet, many old folks have problems focusing at certain distances.. this causes them to move paper or a PDA back and forth.. which would zoom/shrink. They aren't necessarily zooming, so much as finding a focal point... this might lead to some serious over-correction as you try and find a usable size and focal point. hope you can turn it off.
meh
Accelerometers sense motion to zoom, eh?
They had BETTER have an option to turn that off, or else it sure would make using it on a bus interesting.
Why is it that roughly 80% of the initial posts involve some sort of derision of this product? It is a computer built in India and its made to be simple yet slashdotters automatically start associating it as something cheap or stupid. Grow up people. Indians have just as much a right as anyone else to pioneer in the field of technology and they did not fucking make fun of you idiots during the dot-com bubble so don't bash their innovations.
No I am not from India. I live in North America and I am a starving coder also. I just have respect for development of technology no matter where it is made.
The group of scientists "Bangalore Seven" developed the Simputer with the average user in mind. The average user lives in a indian village and is much different from the western users. So the design is also different to fit the specific needs of it's customers:
# Power supply in rural India is pretty bad, with frequent "load-shedding" blackouts. Without an UPS you can't run a desktop. The simputer runs on three AAA batteries.
# Your average user may has never used a computer before. So you'll have to keep the design as simple as possible.
# Desktop PCs consist of many parts that fail too easily under rough conditions. You need air condition or other internal sophisticated cooling equipment. Indian summers are hot and humid during the monsoon season. See the a chart of Delhi an an example. If something fails it's hard to get a replacement.
# The simputer is still much to expensive for customers with an average income of 40$/month. So expect that many people in a group (family, friends, collegues) will share one simputer. The desing makes sharing easy. Private data is saved to smartcards.
I think there're still many issues with the simputer. It's much too expensive. The price will have to drop to 50$, so they'll need to get the indian government to invest in this thing. Language support seems to be quite good with Hindi, Kannada, English already supported. Bengali , Tamil, Maharathi, Urdu also need to support. And Sanskrit would be nice for high-tech pundits =). But what to the illiterate people do? They need an icon-based GUI, speech output, or even speech recognition. Easy to set up printing would also be a nice feature.
As for the motion-controlled features we'll just have to wait for first-hand reviews. There're already games preinstalled based on this feature.
If all these requirements are met then there'll be a big market for the simputer - the whole india subcontinent in fact. And there's china that has similar requirements to get a majority of people to use computers. So India wouldn't have problems to export large quantities of the simputer to other emerging nations.