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."

Comments

Re:Over-correction

[Monkelectric]

I was thinking the same thing, but I also had another concern ...how much did it cost to implement that feature? I have done some robot building in my day and pretty crappy accelerometer costs 25 - 40$.

Seems like a dead end to me

[downix]

I tried to contact the simputer folk on 3 different occasions to license the design to no responce. For being an "open" platform, the docs and schematics are similarly locked-down making it impossible to even do a review.

Zoom-Zoom

[SEWilco]

I believe moving towards you to zoom in has already been implemented at the physical layer, but they can't claim the laws of Physics as a feature.

The feature may have some interesting effects, with the optical zoom interacting with the on-screen zoom.

But as someone mentioned, a jolt on a bus could appear to jiggle the view window over an unmoving "document" -- the same could be done with the Z-axis, so a jolt toward you could reduce the image so as to keep the apparent size the same. (not that the screen has enough resolution to make the reduction optically perfect)

However, motion sickness is caused when the visual movement does not match that of the inner ear. I wonder how an unmoving object would be interpreted; maybe those with head-worn displays have some experience. (The reaction apparently is because many poisons cause visual distortions, so the resulting nausea is intended to trigger vomiting and remove any poisonous material which is still in the stomach.)