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A cheap hand held computer designed by Indian scientists has been launched after a delay of nearly three years.
Funnily enough I saw a short programme on the simputer on an internal flight in the Philippines about 3 or 4 years ago. And thought it was a brilliant idea. It certainly shows that India is becoming an innovator in the field of technology and not just an end user. The model demonstrated had an ear phone and could speak in urdo and other Indian languages and dialects, one of the "model" applications being to give interactive "spoken" advice on crop treatments to farmers in remote rural areas where reading literacy levels are lower. The article was very brief but I think the idea was to produce a device that could be used for information dissemination that was highly portable, could be shared among the communities with a low input usage. IIRC the device had a memory card slot so that individual farmers (or communities) could store their preferences and review them next time they had access to the machine. The only thing that concerned me was that it had (at the time of the article) a proprietary web language (not HTML) :-( It would be nice to have one to play with but I'm not sure my urdo literacy would compare with that of a native remote Indian hill farmer ;-) Tom. As an aside, Most products in the palmtop category are designed to be information providers rather than high volume data recorders. Years ago there was a device that was portable that had six buttons spaced for the fingers (two under the thumb one being a toggled caps lock). It was modelled on the court recorder devices used in trials. Although there is a learning curve in getting proficient and fast with the input, it was possible to use it (in skilled hands) to record dictation in real time, alas the idea never caught on and designers turned to using stylus type devices instead. Information in this message is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is the intended solely for the person ( or persons) to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender, and please delete the message from your system immediately. The views in this message are personal, they are not necessarily those of Torbay Council. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.