Nice, but too expensive. I have a better idea... (Score 1)

The Simputer is a sexy idea, but $214 is way too much dough for rural India to afford (or so I've gathered from the other posts here). Assuming the availability of electricity (and the Simputer folks seem to make this assumption as well), it would be much smarter to salvage used equipment from large multi-nationals (there is no shortage of used computers out there) and hook them together with cheap 10mbit/s cards and ethernet cables.

I mean, really, a used Pentium 90 might as well be worth nothing in the United States. Yet I remember compiling Linux kernels (1.2.13 on Slackware... ahhh memories... :-) and doing timesharing on a 486SX/33, while connected to the local BBS over a modem. It didn't seem too bad back in '95 and '96; nowadays we're all a little spoiled.

Pentiums can do decent multimedia, text-to-speech, and can handle fairly large hard drives. 10mbit/sec ethernet can do remarkable things over fairly bad--i.e. cheap--cabling (in fact will go over two-pair phone cable in a pinch, if you don't mind a little RF noise). A 286, ISA NIC, a packet driver with IP stack, and SSH for DOS makes a great terminal. How much are 286's going for these days? You could hang 10 of these things off a Pentium, easy. Shell accounts for everyone!

Just don't make me pay the power bill, umkay? :-)