$35 Indian Tablet Vs Dell Streak

Sagar, a friend of mine has been pushing me news about the new $35 laptop from the Indian HRD Ministry… And I’ve been saying it’s one of the false promises that politicians are known to make. Nothing good comes out of these news flashes. On the other hand, we also have another device that Dell is preparing to launch known as Dell Streak. These two devices have a lot in common, but are also quite different in the markets they are targeted for and obviously the price.

Now the Indian $35 Laptop:

Processor / Chipset still unknown 7-inch resistive touch screen display Capable of browsing the web 2GB of RAM Wi-Fi connectivity USB port VGA camera on the back

Interestingly the software or the operating systems seem to be different in different demos. Some recent demos are showing an Android operating system, while the initial demos of the device seemed to have Meego installed on it. The device is still a year away from availability, but having seen it run and that too pretty smoothly for such a cheap device on Android, I am very pleasantly surprised. No technology in recent years has blown my imagination like this one… and if it can be mass produced with excellent software, this is the tablet that the world’s poor children were waiting. Understanding some of the challenges of such devices, I do not believe the tablet is still there. But it is definitely a leap forward…

Dell Streak:

The Dell Streak is another tablet device running the Android operating system. The Dell Streak is costing $550 and is available with a contract from AT&T at $300.

1Ghz Snapdragon ARM processor from Qualcomm 5-inch capacitive multi-touch WVGA 5 MP autofocus camera on back VGA camera on the front 512MB RAM 3G + Wi-Fi support GPS Accelerometer

Streak is pretty expensive when you compare it feature-wise to the Indian tablet. Obviously the market and the margins are different, but just goes to show the line between phones and tablets is blurring. As Android becomes more prevalent in the market, the line becomes more blurred. As realized in Meego, the combination of Maemo (Nokia) and Moblin (Intel-Linux) turns out to be very powerful smartphone OS. Although these devices are great, it is the applications that make the user-experience special and make these useful.

As the Indian tablet progresses forward, the acceptance of the device are going to be determined by the applications that run on the device. If they are targeted towards children between the ages (6-12), it is going to be very interesting to build applications for them. Where education and knowledge can be taken to new limits, the true potential of such devices also depend on how they are delivered.

Windows Beats Linux/OSX at Handwriting

Lately I’ve been trying to code an application which requires some form of natural handwriting recognition. Natural Handwriting is basically the way you write on your Tablet/Pocket PC/Palm/Mobile, either using a stylus on your touch-screen or on the desktop using mouse. And after looking at different options available for handwriting recognition, Windows beats every other operating system including Linux and Mac OSX hands down!!

For the last month or so I’ve tried every possible handwriting recognition software and API out there. Paid, free and open-source API or Programs for Windows, Linux and OSX. Out of all the ones I tried, only one seemed to be perfectly working and easy to develop upon and its from Microsoft. Microsoft has this ultra-amazing API called InkAnalysis, but obviously and sadly for me, works only on Windows. And sad because the application for which I’m developing this handwriting recognition module is a popular open-source kids software and mainly targeted towards Linux distros.

InkAnalysis is a powerful API that performs 2 complementary activities of handwriting recognition and layout classification. InkAnalysis API has very good Interfaces for detecting the layout of any  given document and based on the understanding of the layout it performs handwriting recognition. Even without training it amazingly detects a wide variety of handwriting that even I had a hard time reading as a professor when checking my students’ answer sheets. The API was earlier only available as part of the Windows Vista SDK, but Microsoft has also released the API through the Tablet PC Platform SDK. This means applications that use InkAnalysis API can be run on not only Windows Vista but also Windows XP SP2, SP3 and the future... And the best showcase of the accuracy and strength of the API is through the built-in Windows Vista app called Tablet PC Input (check below screenshot)

 

During the trials of all the different APIs and programs, I had high expectations of finding something from Apple that “just works”. With the iPhone they seemed to me like the “touch” geniuses and handwriting would definitely be in touch category. But alas! OSX InkWell isn’t good enough. It makes too many mistakes and correcting them doesn’t work very well. Training or no training it had hard time recognizing natural cursive handwriting. Even the API was pretty complex to use and the didn’t have enough explanation.

Finally I came back to where I started... Looking for a API that would work with Linux, preferably was open-source licensed. I tried a few and none were close to useable. HRE from Sun was archiac and complex, Tomoe is for Japanese and Chinese script only, LipiTK from HP Labs doesn’t work like advertised and support won’t reply back to emails. Google’s revived Tesseract is only a OCR-engine, good for typed text and not handwriting. OCRopus is also work-in-progress and not working at the moment. With all my hopes down on the project, I finally reached CellWriter. CellWriter seems to be a good working handwriting recognition, but doesn’t work as modestly as InkWell or perfectly as InkAnalysis. CellWriter uses a cell-based, single-character recognizer. It requires training without which it can’t understand much, but once trained is pretty accurate at character recognition. But I tried applying it to multiple cells and it doesn’t quite work. May be a good character recognizer, but not handwriting recognition.

I thus concluded Microsoft is way ahead of the competition on handwriting recognition. Handwritten input system is useful for a lot of people and developers from the open-source community have yet to realize this fact. After all the Vista rant is popular on the web, someone should have seen its good side!!

Intel to Own Hard-disks in Centrino 2

Intel has been on a war to conquer every PC component. And as the war wages ahead, Intel is going ahead to capture the hard-disks in laptops through the Centrino 2 branding. Intel will be adding SSD drives to the list of requirements to make a laptop have the Centrino 2 logo. Intel has recently uncovered gold in manufacturing and this seems to be a logical steps towards increasing demand for these drives.

Intel's Centrino has been the most successful PC branding and its synonymous with laptops with Wifi. If Intel Inside brought processors to the limelight, Centrino made Wifi and Wireless Internet a necessity inside laptops. Intel has plans to do something similar with SSD (Solid State Drives) in laptops.  Intel High Performance SSD is mainly targeted towards enterprise, mid-range and high-end notebook markets. Intel High Performance SSDs come in 2 variations - Client X25-M (2.5 inch) and Client X18-M (1.8 inch). Both the SSD drives will come in 80Gb sizes and will have the SATA interface. By the end of the year, Intel will be selling 160Gb SSDs and 250GB in 2009.

If you think that Intel SSDs is only good for Intel, then its an incorrect notion. Intel SSDs are the best performing SSD in the market and come at excellent sizes. Intel is also pricing these pretty competitively. The SSDs also require less power compared to normal hard-disk drives and this means that the battery life of such devices are higher. These laptops will also feel lighter and perform equivalently or better in most conditions.