Bangalore company to offer Linux PDA

Bangalore-based Infomart (India) Pvt. Ltd. has designed a Linux-based personal digital assistant (PDA), that aims to offer features comparable to PDAs built around Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC operating system (OS), but at a price below lower-cost PDAs based on the Palm OS.

A developer version of the product, called the Kaii, is scheduled to be released in November this year, with the release of the product to customers scheduled for the first quarter of next year. Infomart plans to license the design of the Kaii to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide who will take the product to market with their own brand names.

"Our key selling point to OEMs is that we can mold the hardware design and the software of the Kaii quickly to meet their specific requirements," said Devesh Agarwal, managing director of Infomart.

Infomart has designed the Kaii around a SH7727 processor from Hitachi Ltd in Tokyo. OEMs are expected to retail a monochrome version of the product, with 16M bytes of flash memory, 32M bytes of RAM, a monochrome LCD (liquid crystal display), and multimedia capabilities at US$199. A top-end version at $399 will have 32M bytes of flash, 64M bytes of RAM, a color TFT (thin film transistor) LCD and multimedia.

The Kaii offers interfaces such as USB (Universal Serial Bus) Host Control, USB Client, serial port, and an IrDA (Infrared Data Association) interface. Expansion slots include a SD (Secure Digital) card expansion slot for RAM expansion, and CompactFlash expansion slot for Bluetooth, 802.11, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), GPS (Global Positioning System), Ethernet, and modem connectivity. Infomart is also planning to integrate in the next version of Kaii a module for GSM and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) wireless connectivity.

The Kaii is the second attempt by Indian designers to build a handheld computer, the first being the Simputer designed by academics from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in tandem with engineers from Bangalore-based Encore Software Ltd. [See "Linux handheld PC developer targets new markets" July 19, 2002]. While the Simputer was designed as a low-cost, handheld computer for rural applications, and later repositioned for business applications, the Kaii has been positioned from the outset as a PDA for business use. Also the Kaii has been designed as a product for markets worldwide, with support for European and Chinese languages, while the Simputer's initial focus was on building support for Indian languages.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine