India’s Cheap New Handheld ‘Simputer’

India’s new “Simputer” — a handheld computer whose name was chosen to suggest that it is simple, inexpensive, and multilingual — will cost between 10,500 to 23,000 rupees ($214-469), in a country where the average per capita income is about $450. Using a Linux operating system, the device will have applications for voicemail, text-to-speech translation, and Internet access, and will be powered by an Intel StrongARM processor and two AA batteries. Random-access memory options will be 32 or 64 megabytes. The Simputer was designed by engineers at Encore Software and professors from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and will be marketed through a few large Indian technology companies. (Reuters/San Jose Mercury News 5 Jul 2002)

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