[ Thanks to Infomart for this link. ]
“Infomart saw an opening between the high-end high-cost
Pocket PC PDAs, and the low-end low-cost Palm PDAs, and created a
new PDA called “Kaii” to fill that gap. “We wanted to make a PDA
with the features of high-end PDAs, but at an affordable cost,”
said Devesh R. Agarwal, managing director of the Bangalore, India
based development company. “Our initial target market was India
only, but as we progressed further into the development cycle we
realized that there were opportunities in the global market also.”To meet the project’s goals, Infomart decided to use Linux as
the new PDA’s embedded operating system right from the beginning.
“We had extensive discussions with Lineo,” said Agarwal. “We wanted
to use a standard software stack that would be prevalent in the
industry, and saw the combination of [what Sharp and Lineo had
created for Sharp’s new Zaurus PDA] — and their commitment to
Linux — as a strong leverage point that could offer both users and
developers a strong third alternative to PalmOS and PocketPC.”Infomart’s new PDA is called Kaii, which means “hand” in
Kannada, the local language of the state of Karnataka where
Infomart is located. Kaii also means the same thing in Tamil, the
language of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.”