Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 08:06:26 -0700 From: John Oram <norami@unlimited.net> To: "list=freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: low-cost computer from India Message-ID: <396DDAF2.55BA4F20@unlimited.net>
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Forwarded from a friend in Belgium:
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07.1999-07.2000
bYtES For aLL
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_/ B y t e s F o r A l l --- http://www.bytesforall.org
_/ Making Computing Relevant to the People of South Asia
_/
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Special first anniversary issue. July 1999-July 2000.
We thank all our many friends and supporters who have
offered encouragement along every step of the journey
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* SIMPUTER -- SUB-$200 INTERNET DEVICE to help non-literate
* users: In an effort to bring the Internet to the masses in
* India and other developing countries, several academics and
* engineers have used their spare time to design a sub-$200
* handheld Net appliance, writes Bangalore-based John Ribeiro of
* IDG News Service (June 23).
* The Simputer, or SIMple ComPUTER, will enable India's
* illiterate population (some 48% of the country of one billion)
* to surf the Web. The device was designed by professors and
* students at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at
* Bangalore, and engineers from Bangalore-based design company
* Encore Software. A prototype of the appliance will be available
* in August.
* The Simputer is built around Intel's StrongARM CPU, with Linux
* as the operating system. It will have 16 MB of flash memory, a
* monochrome liquid crystal display (LCD) with a touch panel
* overlay for pen-based computing, and a local-language
* interface. The appliance will have Infrared Data Association
* and Universal Serial Bus interfaces, and will feature Internet
* access and mail software.
* Its designers expect the Simputer to be used not only as a
* personal Internet access device, but also by communities of
* users at kiosks. A smart-card interface to the device will
* enable the use of the device for applications such as micro-
* banking.
* "We expect to change the model for the proliferation of
* information technology in India," says Professor Swami Manohar,
* professor in the computer science and automation department of
* the IISc. "The current PC-centric model is not sustainable
* because of the high cost of the PC, and also because we expect
* that most of the users will not be literate."
* A subsequent version of the Simputer will also offer speech
* recognition for basic navigation through the software menus.
* The speech dictionary will be customizable to support different
* languages. A text-to-speech system will also be developed to
* take the technology to India's illiterate population. Later
* versions will also offer wireless technology.
* The intellectual property for the device has been transferred
* free to a non-profit trust, called the Simputer Trust, and both
* the software and the hardware for the appliance have been
* offered as open source technology. In the open source model of
* development, users and developers, often unpaid, work together
* to update technology. Manohar says that the trust decided to
* put the technology in Open Source to enable third party
* software developers and designers to add value to the platform.
* The technology for the product will be licensed to
* manufacturers at a nominal fee of $1150, which is to be used to
* finance upgrades to the Simputer. A number of large
* manufacturers have shown interest in licensing the technology,
* though the interest is currently confined to Indian companies,
* according to Vinay Deshpande, chairman of Encore and a member
* of the Simputer Trust. He says that the designers have been
* able to achieve the sub-$200 price point since the electronic
* components used in the device are all off-the-shelf volume
* components, and the software is primarily open source software
* such as Linux.
* http://www.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,17401,00.html
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