Big Apple's Rs. 7000 Inter-ligent PC puts the processor board inside the monitor and a telephone handset in a recess on top.

BANGALORE: The congratulatory cries of most sections of Indian industry in the days immediately after the Union Budget have drowned the muted, if bemused reaction of one section of consumers: For lakhs of potential buyers, the proposals tabled by "PC" — P. Chidambaram — might seem like disincentives to acquire that first PC (personal computer): After many years of gradually reducing taxes and duties, the Finance Minister has slapped an eight per cent excise duty on packaged software and 12 per cent on computer products.

The logic flies in the face of everything successive governments at the Centre have professed: their desire to promote computer and Internet penetration, even across the so-called digital divide.

Software finally hit the zero duty-mark at the turn of the century and PC imports became duty-free last year in keeping with global tariff obligations. Now seemingly all this is reversed — and most major indigenous and international PC vendors have suggested that they may have to hike prices as a result.

However the booming market — Indians bought five million PCs during 2005-06, with aam janatha or lay users accounting for twice the growth rates of corporate India — has inspired some innovative solutions that keep the prices still this side of affordable.

At the first major Indian post -budget computer mela, which concluded in Bangalore on Sunday, the Hyderabad-based Big Apple Mfg., unveiled an unusual design: an "Intel-ligent PC" which accommodates all the electronics including the mother board, the hard disk, the memory, the modem and the power supplies inside the casing of the 14-inch colour monitor.

A recess on top of the monitor also houses a telephone handset.

There are no external drives — floppy or CD/DVD — but with 10 gigabytes of hard drive space, and 64 megabytes of memory, as well as built-in stereo speakers, the asking price of Rs. 6,995 might seem attractive to many first time buyers.

The default Celeron chip can be upgraded to a more powerful processor for an additional Rs. 900 and a CD read-write drive can be latched on for another Rs. 2,000.

Big Apple's Prabhu Dayal Agarwal explained that the model conceived by chipmaker Intel has been imported from Europe and has seen a good off-take not just from lay consumers but from call centres and networked users.

Arcamax, a Bangalore-based PC maker, has shrunk the entire "CPU" part of the PC — the central processing unit (based on a hyper threaded Pentium chip), DVD drive, 80 GB hard disk, 512 MB memory etc, into a tiny notebook-sized cabinet and thrown in a 17-inch flat screen liquid crystal monitor and a keyboard for just under half-a-lakh rupees.

Entire range

The Taiwan -based Acer is still offering its entire range of Aspire and Media Center desktops and TravelMate notebooks at pre-budget prices.

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