Simputer set for November launch @ sub-Rs 10 K

Anshuman Daga

BANGALORE: The "Simputer", a $200 (around Rs 10,000) handheld

Indian computer aimed at taking the Internet to rural areas, will hit the market

in November, the firm spearheading the manufacture of the device designed by a

non-profit trust said.

The Simputer, short for Simple, Inexpensive and Multilingual, is a brainchild

of the Simputer Trust, one of whose key trustees is the chief executive officer

of Encore Software Ltd. The trust sells the design and license to make the

"Simputer" and Encore is expected to be the first to make and sell it.

"We are not projecting this as a general purpose PDA (personal digital

assistant) but we will use this as a platform to deliver various IT

initiatives," Mark Mathias, Encore's vice-president, told Reuters on

Monday. Designed for mass use, the Simputer uses Linux, the open-source software

that is freely available on the Internet and elsewhere.

Mathias is one of the seven group members of the project. "The hand-held

market is just about exploding in India and we believe we are the early entrants

with such a product. Encore planned to begin selling the product from

November," he said. The Simputer Trust unveiled the device in April.

The Bangalore-based Encore expected to sell about 100,000 units of Simputer

in the first year of operations with this increasing to between 250,000 to

350,000 in two years. Encore's low-cost device, is part of a series of

initiatives by a set of socially committed entrepreneurs and scientists to

bridge the "digital divide" in India, which has a booming software

industry alongside some 35 percent of citizens who cannot read or write.

Besides hooking up to the Internet, the Simputer, slightly larger than the

popular PDA made by Palm Inc, has a text-to-speech software and other

easy-to-use applications aimed at allowing India's vast rural population to gain

from using technology.

"We are looking at a few areas like sales automation and specific

applications in electronic governance," Mathias said. India has a very low

personal computer base of about five million in a nation of over one billion

people, but several state governments are increasingly using technology to help

the rural population.

For example, there is a plan to use the Internet to make farmers aware of the

prices their produce can fetch. Encore's CEO Vinay Deshpande is also the

president of India's Manufacturers Association of Information Technology. The

firm says it has received inquiries from companies in Latin America, Europe and

some Asian countries for supplies. The Simputer, powered by an Intel chip offers

a 32-megabit memory and can be shared by users through a "smart card"

reader which stores personal information.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.