Any Indian design of technology has to therefore lend itself to this fundamental principle: allow sharing by making the device impersonal.
Computers are not personalized in behaviour, but they are so in their accumulation of data. The hard disk has to be partitioned (in a logical sense) among several users to allow each user their private space. Once we have multiple accounts, we must have a superuser, an administrator and quickly these things become complicated. The Simputer therefore has no hard disk.
Does this mean there is no personalization possible? The answer is no. personalization is possible in a limited way using smart cards. The smart card will small amount of personal data such as your name, address, probably your electronic signature etc. The Simputer has a slot wherein you can insert the smart card to achieve this limited personalization. In fact, we envisage a family having a smart card shared among its members!
Why a smart card? A smart card will typically cost about Rs 100. Armed with a smart card, most day to day needs should be adequately taken care of. You still cannot carry your unfinished novel/paper on the smart card but this is not its purpose anyway.
A small compact hand held device with a smart card can a reasonable device only if it can be used by a majority of the population. But the majority of the population is semi-literate or illiterate. The act of taking IT to the masses would be a myth if leave this large segment of our population out of its reach. Localization of language does not solve this problem: English script and Kannada script are the same for an illiterate.
We got around this by making the Simputer talk. We have developed a text to speech synthesiser (TTS) that can take a text in either Hindi or Kannada and outputs synthesised speech. On the other hand, the user has a touch sensitive screen driven by mostly icons. Also, every icon can potentially speak back via a TTS or a voice over (VO). This establishes a complete loop: visually select icons, and receive feedback for the act of selection using TTS/VO.
Thus, use of simple icons to be selected by pointing with a stylus and text-to-speech output in the local language are the two primary means of communication. Text entry is to be through a soft-keyboard and by a novel system of character input called tap-a-tap. The user is not expected to be familiar with the currently widespread user interface paradigm (windows, slide bars and pull-down menus). The notion of opening and closing various applications for various purposes (editors, browsers, mailer etc.) and maintaining several windows are also complicated for the naive user.
The Simputer presents a uniform user interface to its user by way of a browser called imli that renders the Information Markup Language (IML). IML is an XML based language, designed by us, specific to hand held devices like the Simputer.