A couple of weeks after chip-maker Intel announced a computer specifically for the Indian market, technology major Hewlett Packard launched a new type of keyboard that significantly speeds up typing Indian languages, a media report said.

The Gesture Keyboard, developed at HP's Bangalore research laboratories, has gone on sale in India and consists of a pen and touch-sensitive pad that allows users to select from a grid of consonants and then modify them quickly with a pen stroke.

The two combine to form a syllable, significantly speeding-up the process of writing in an Indic script, a report said.

This key board will reduce the difficulty of using standard QWERTY-style keyboards for more than 18 Indic languages, it said.

"For anyone who knows how to write on paper, it takes 15 to 20 minutes to learn the gesture keyboard," said Shekhar Borgaonkar, one of the researchers behind the device.

"For all of the Indic languages, this will be the only keyboard needed to enter data into computers," he said.

The keyboard can be used to write Hindi, Marathi and Kannada, spoken by more than 400 million people. It costs  over £30 and can be used by any machine running Windows or Linux.

Ajay Gupta, who heads the Indian labs of Hewlett Packard, told BBC that it was a myth that Indians wanted cheap goods.

During a visit to the computer giant's UK headquarters, he urged companies hoping to boost computer use in India to offer innovative solutions and value.

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