Cellphone and laptop boosters are duking it out about the best machines for developing countries–I myself see uses for both kinds of devices. Now let me remind people of the existence of another gizmo. PDAs, anyone?
The PalmOS-based Meazura PDA is even waterproof. Just the ticket for reading an e-book on a river bank in a steamy jungle? Too bad about the price–$399. The Meazura causes me to appreciate the OLPC laptop project even more, even if OLPC won’t make the $100 goal immediately.
Related: The Simputer. The price-benefit ratio isn’t good enough, but I admire the Simputer folks for trying, and they may yet succeed if they can slash costs enough. What’s more, how about a cellphone-PDA? It would be for communications and for some ed-related purposes such as e-books. Even then, however, I don’t envision it as a replacement for the OLPC machine.
I love these Meazura devices. They can run for a week on a charge. They’re meant to be for industrial use and are very rugged as well as waterproof. Aceeca charges $400 for them because that market will bear it (they’re on the cheap end of it, in fact) and because it’s not high volume. In the volume that the $100 laptop folks are considering I doubt rugged PDAs like this would cost more than $50 to produce.
Hi, David. I think you’re really on to something with tht $50 reference! See an earlier note I posted. Thanks. Here’s to computer AND phone power! David
There is a project that specifically aims at designing or assigning one notebook and one PDA as useful for fieldworkers. Did we not write about that in the past? I am afraid I forgot the name.
“they’re on the cheap end of it, in fact”
You can’t get a rugged Pocket PC device for that kind of money!
[…] Water and mobile devices really do mix! The news today brings a couple of interesting items that bring together two items that don’t normally go together – mobile devices and water…Water Powered Mobile Phones [cellular-news.com] Two Japanese companies, DoCoMo and Aquafairy, are getting together to make a "water based micro fuel cell" that they hope to sell for use in mobile phones. The basic idea is that the recharger will turn water into the hydrogen that powers the fuel cell. Specifically, "The fuel cell is the smallest in the world with power output of 2 watts. The recharger combines DoCoMo’s recharger technology with Aquafairy’s thin film power unit technology and catalyst for producing hydrogen from water." A waterproof Palm-powered PDA [teleread.com] Generally, if you’re going to get a ruggedized device, you’ll pay steeply for it, and the specs will seem to be from devices several years old. Here’s one more device that can stand up to the elements and keep on going. It’s a $399 device, with only a 160×160 monochrome display, and a 33MHz Dragonball-VZ processor, and the ancient PalmOS 4.1.2. Yet, as TeleRead points out, it just might provide a device that can be an e-book reader around water. Personally, however, I’d rather just grab a case such as this pouch or something slightly more robust. […]
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