Dear all, I tested the Audio Book Reader (ABR) which was in news these days and thought of sharing my views on it.
The device has been designed by a NGO called samdristhi chamta vikas awang anushandhan which abbreviates to the accronym Saksham in Hindi alphabets. Please note that this is a different organisation and Saksham Trust Delhi associated with Mr. Dipendra has nothing to do with it. Representatives from this Nagpur based NGO came to my office to demonstrate the ABR yesterday I.e. 7 Sep 09. The Maha Mantri of the NGO said that they were working for the all round development of the visually impaired that is samagra vikas and that they have officers all over the country. The name was acquired one year earlier but they had been working under a different banner for many more years. The ABR is about the size of a bar of soap, slightly thicker and heavier. it has a memory card protruding out on one side and six soft touch buttons on the top. On switching it on, it gives a welcome message, informs about the battery level and then offers to read the manual. All this is in a female recorded voice. The keys do not have a voice promt attached to them, they just give a beep. The idea is that since there are so few buttons and few functions visually impaired persons can operate it easily and that is certainly the case. It does not have a in-built speaker and one needs to use a headphone or a ampli speaker. they have also designed a headphone jack attachment which allows you to connect 10 headphones at a time for group listening. The unit costs Rs. 4000 to individuals with a 2 GB memory card. With the attachment it costs Rs. 5000. It is available through this organization or their representatives only. The biggest drawback is that it can play only Wave files and that too of a specific sampling rate and bit rate. It can only play .wav files recorded at 8000 Hz and at 8 bit per second. This means that you cannot simply copy your mp3 files on the memory card for reading. you need to get them converted to this particular wav format first. considering that mp3 is the dominant format now-a-days and that several other alternatives are available, I wonder if this device will find any takers. Besides it offers to propogate yet another format for talking books which is non-standard and not approved or followed by any other organization around the world. Further, this device has no other function, you cannot record or listen to FM as is the case with most flash memory based pocket devices now. In my opinion, it is worth waiting for the Buddy player which will have all these facilities with DAISY books player and at the same cost. Prashant Ranjan Verma Manager DU-NTPC Foundation ICT Training Centre Tutorial Building, Faculty of Arts University of Delhi, Delhi-110007 Ph: 011 27662602 Personal website & blog at: www.prashant.myehome.in To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
