Low-cost ‘simputers’ to hit market next month

Low-cost ‘simputers’ to hit market next month
MAX MARTIN

BANGALORE, MARCH 25: The inauguration of String Laboratories in the city on Friday brought the scientists here a step closer to the release of a low-cost, multi-lingual, mass access, palm-top device called ‘‘Simputer’’ or simple computer. Simputer, with a touch-sensitive liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, a speaker, a microphone and a stylus to touch and drag icons, is expected to hit the markets by April and will cost Rs 9,000 apiece.

Users can surf the Net by selecting icons and simputer’s text-to-speech function would read back the contents in Kannada, Hindi and Tamil. English, being a non-phonetic language, remains a tough nut to crack for simputer.

‘‘We want to promote computers in the Hindi belt as well,’’ said Vijay Chandru, a computer applications professor at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) part of the PicoPeta Simputers team that developed the device.

Simputer can even compute and transact online and therefore be used for Net-shopping, Net-banking and to store agricultural data and promote rural e-governance. And, it does not even matter if you can’t read. ‘‘Simputer is seen as bridge across the digital divide,’’ Swami Manohar, Chandru’s colleague at the IISc and the leader of the PecoPeta venture, added. Their two academic colleagues involved in the Strand Genomics initiative, V. Vinay and Ramesh Hariharan, are also collaborators in the non-profit effort.

Simputer uses a single, consistent, browser-like interface instead of the trendy Windows, slidebars and pull-down menus. So there is no need to open and close applications to edit, browse or to send mail. The computer language used in Simputer is the Information Mark-up Language a primitive form of which appeared in the master’s thesis of two IISc students in 1999.

The Simputer team developed these applications on a noble philosophy to provide free software access and promote open source initiatives. The software design details are available at www.simputer.org.