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The Amida Simputer




The Amida Simputer - the portable handheld computer - designed and developed by PicoPeta and manfactured by BEL hit the market recently on 26th ...

A few of us were given a simputer each at our workplace (BEL) to evaluate for a week before the launch - its amazingly stable and feature-rich.

A host of innovative features from gesture recognition (motion sensors) to being a mobile device connecting to the net from landlines (though at home somehow I could not manage to connect some busy signal/sending password, but some of my colleagues managed to connect successfully) or CDMA phones, a handful of games, an MP3 player, an image viewer, browser, anywhere text scribbling/erase and many many more nifty utilities. The gesture recognition thingie is real stunning; flipping the device you can navigate or move through pictures, ebooks, notes... I actually managed to take notes at a meeting using the scribble feature using the accompanying stylus - it has a touch screen and a soft keyboard for all the work ...

It connects to PCs - has two USB ports (one master, one slave), one serial and mic in and headphone out apart from inbuilt speaker; even a terminal with all your commands supported. The whole thing is a software layer called Alchemy over Linux, currently kernel 2.4.18 - runs on an Intel StrongArm processor with 64 MB RAM and flash storage of 32 MB. Once charged to full using the battery charger it last for 6-8 hours. 3 variants exist now - one colour (LCD/TFT screen) and two monochrome variants - with appropriate prices.
Its portable, easy to use and navigate and extremely handy. A very cool gadget indeed fully concieved and developed in India - exhibiting the power and reliabilty of Linux ! And coming from the stable of the IISc professors and research grads it will go a long way ...

More info at : http://amidasimputer.com

A story from Slashdot on the same event ...



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