Low-Cost Simputer Fails to Win Indians' Interest

prostoalex writes "The Associated Press looks at the Indian low-cost Simputer project and registers it as a failure. Picopeta sold 2,000 units over the past year, while Encore Software sold 2,000 Simputers. Only 10% of the devices were bought for rural areas, which the device was originally designed for. The reason? The companies need to sell quite a few simplistic monochrome devices to allow for the low price tag of $200. Meanwhile, anyone can buy a powerful device with a color screen for $199 from a major vendor."

Comments

Time to market

[QuantumG]

Blah. It kinda reminds me of when the US government decided that a mass produced gun would be a cool idea. They made a handgun that could fire one round and then be manually reloaded (but generally wasn't), added a "comic strip" of instructions and put it in a plastic bag to be dropped from aircraft in areas that were under seige. The price for each gun was so rediculously low that it was possible to make millions of them. There's probably still millions of them sitting in military warehouses.

Now that's the way to make manufactured "aid" systems. Doing the same with computers would be simple.

They sold it for the wrong price

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS is what they should have sold over there. This is a 16MB Handheld PDA w/Built-in 56K Modem people! And the price (which is the most important thing) is BELOW 25 BUCKS.

Open or Port The Software!

[billstewart]

The Simputer folks designed some really cool software for use with low-horsepower machines where people use a wide variety of languages and alphabets and village-appropriate applications. It was cool stuff, and apparently they were better at that than they were at hardware design. Sounds like it's a good time for them to recognize what they're good at and what they're not good at, and port the software to newer commercial PDA platforms and/or open it so other people can port it.

I can't tell if that $199 Dell can support USB adequately or not - too many PDA devices know how to be a USB slave that can be updated by a computer, but don't know how to be a USB master than can drive printers, modems, etc. But it wouldn't be surprising to see hardware that can do that well in a similar price range - if not now, then wait 3-6 months.