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| Asymmetric progression! |
| Friday, May 13, 2005. |
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By Deepak Balachandran |
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Three
years ago, when I set up my current office, my connectivity was cutting edge
in availability terms. That translates to 64Kbps ISDN on which I counted a
realization of 20Kbps as value for money. Today, I am connected on 1Mbps,
easily realizing 30 times that speed. Cost per month, three years ago:
Rs.18,000/-. Cost today: Rs.5000/-.
That's such a skewed progression that its feels almost natural that the
Rs.47,000/- IBM desktop I bought then be dwarfed in performance terms by a
ten thousand Rupee "Amar PC" (literally, "My PC") brought by- surprise,
surprise, an Indian company, Xenitis.
Today's newspaper brought even better news. Mobilis. I'll wager a lot of
money on that name gaining a LOT of popularity in the coming years.
Developed by Bangalore-based Encore Software Limited and the Indian
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, this little wonder should be
a darling for all those people for whom wintel (Windows-Intel) is too much
to chew. That's roughly three-fourths of the world.
Mobilis has a
7.4 inch LCD/TFT screen weighs just 750 g., and supports word processing,
spreadsheet, Powerpoint presentations, e-mail, Web browsing, media player
(audio/video), text-to-speech, book reading and other small database
applications. The billing starts below Rs. 10,000/- and goes up to Rs.
25,000/- for the Mobilis TFT with GPRS and GPS in-built.
The bad news- Encore's website doesn't yet carry enough information. There
is a pdf brochure on the site as I write, but no specs available. The good
news- I feel so proud of it all (as an Indian) that I intend to phone them
tomorrow for more details.
For those of you who are too impatient- here are the links:
www.xenitisgroup.com
www.ncoretech.com/mobilis/pdf/mobilisbrochure.pdf
www.csir.res.in/mobilis/mobilis.htm
Its about time India led the world in something, anyway.
By
Deepak Balachandran |
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