Indian handhelds come of age with Kaii

little over a year ago, the media was abuzz with news of a product called the Simputer, a low-cost handheld device that was poised to bridge the digital gap in the country. It represented the combined efforts of academics (IISC) and corporates (Encore). While the debate is still on over the success of the device in attaining its initial objectives, innovations continue to dot the map of Silicon Valley of India, especially in the area of low-cost handhelds. The latest comes from Bangalore-based company Infomart of the Jairamdas Group and it is called `Kaii' (meaning hand in Kannada). It is a personal digital assistant (PDA) using Linux as the embedded operating system. Essentially, the Kaii is being projected as the link between the "high-end, high-cost Pocket PC PDAs and the low-end, low-cost Palm PDAs".

Officials at Infomart were not available for comment but reportedly a developer version of the product is to be released in November this year. And, according to a report quoting Devesh Agarwal, managing director of Infomart, the company plans to target global market with the product although it was initially launched for the domestic market. The Kaii reportedly comes with a Hitachi SH7727 processor, 16M bytes of flash memory, 32M bytes of RAM, a monochrome LCD (liquid crystal display), and multimedia capabilities at US$199. The top-end version at $399 comes with 32M bytes of flash, 64M bytes of RAM, a color TFT (thin film transistor) LCD and multimedia. It also offers interfaces such as USB (Universal Serial Bus) Host Control, USB Client, serial port, and an IrDA (Infrared Data Association) interface.

The company has reportedly brought down the cost of Kaii by using "off-the-shelf components". One key feature of the product is the heavy customisation that it offers, thanks to the open-source operating system that it uses. That is, the hardware design and the software of the Kaii can be modified to meet developers' specific requirements. The company has tied up with Lineo, an US-based embedded software vendor for using the latter's Embedix Plus PDA software stack. It may be mentioned here that Lineo had entered into a partnership with Trolltech AS and Opera Software ASA in Oslo, and Fremont, California-based Insignia Solutions Inc last year to provide a complete software solution for PDAs and mobile phones. This new software platform called the `Embedix Plus for Smart Handheld Devices', incorporates Lineo Embedix SDK, Insignia Jeode Java Virtual Machine technologies, Trolltech Qt/Embedded graphical user interface, and the Opera 5 for Linux Web browser. The platform was meant to facilitate the production of smart handhelds and other such devices.

Kaii comes with the Qt/Embedded graphical user interface (GUI), and Qtopia PDA software from Trolltech AS. The browser is from Opera, and the Java virtual machine is the Insignia Jeode. Based on customer needs, the company will add or remove components from the software stack.

The Infomart route more or less follows the one taken by Sharp for the latter's Linux-based PDA Zaurus launched last year. Sharp too had tied up with Lineo for using the Embedix Plus PDA platform. It may be remembered that the Zaurus launch last year had set a landmark for Linux as a PDA operating system. Indeed, with Zaurus and now Kaii, analysts see the arrival of Linux as the main operating system for handheld devices.

But back to the question of bridging the digital gap in India. While it is too early to comment on Kaii, the Simputer experience suggests that it makes business sense to not confine the product to the low-cost category and market it as a business product. And this is exactly what Infomart has done with the Kaii. The product has been projected for the global market already unlike the Simputer, which was designed as a low-cost, handheld computer for rural applications initially. Also, the Kaii supports European and Chinese languages while the Simputer's initial focus was on applications to suit Indian languages. Of course, according to a report, Infomart does plan to tap the Indian rural market too by developing text to speech applications in Indian languages. But quite obviously, that is not the main focus.

Meanwhile, reports suggest that sales of the Simputer have not been too good since it was launched. This is one reason why Encore Software, the key partner in the development of the product, has been upgrading the product with new versions. While bridging digital gap remains one area, the company is reportedly seeing other oppurtunities too in areas like electronic government, utilities, healthcare, education, banking, financial services etc and for this purpose has tied up with about 10 independent software vendors. Perhaps it is a reflection on the infancy of the rural market in India for such devices. This is especially so given the infrastructural constraints and the low PC and Net penetration in the country. But given the will of some organisations that are combining business potential with developmental causes and the zest with which regional language software and applications are being developed one can perhaps afford to be a little optimistic about bridging the digital gap after all.

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