$100 Laptop, just 1 year away!!
The much awaited $100 laptop being developed by MIT is expected to be available to poor countries by the end of 2006, reports c|net.
The final design(see pic above), which was shown last month in a UN summit in Tunisia will have a low power display that can run upto 40 minutes in black-n-white mode with 1 minute of cranking. The laptop’s casing will be a combination of lime green & light yellow. The laptop may not cost exactly $100, but it’ll be around $100.
This project is for bringing poor school children in poor countries closer to computers & teach them, but then that’s the problem as well, says Negroponte, of the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit group that’s organizing this effort. The problem is that a lot of these laptops will be given to children from poor families which are struggling to survive, like the annual income of an average Nigerian family is about $1000. So they’ll be heavily tempted to sell this laptop for $100 or more in the market as the money they’ll get in return for it will feed them for more than a month. :think:
Besides the tech specifications of a 500Mhz processor & 1GB of memory, the laptop will also be able to double up as an eBook reader(as shown in pic above) with special buttons on the sides of the screen for navigation!! 
Getting this started was quite a bit problem, from convincing manufacturers to make it for $100 to have governments buy them in large quantities of 1 million or above. Brazil and Thailand are among the six countries that have shown a strong interest in this effort, and all that remains to be seen is how soon these laptops will appear on in the grey market!!
(picture credits: c|net)
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Too bad India won’t be getting any (legally). India isn’t on this list.
yep, that’s right!! either they don’t consider India to be poor enough or the Indian Govt. didn’t agree to buy 1 million pieces!!
The latter’s more likely, methinks. I think these will be aroung $150-200 in the grey market when the first arrive.
Somebody may even manage to run Windows on it, which prompts me to ask, why is there a Windows key on a linux powered machine ?!
well, I think that the first one is also highly possible, that is they don’t consider India poor enough!! Or it can be that the Indian government didn’t like the project(or more likely are unaware of it) or didn’t think that they should participate!!
For starter, Dayanidhi Maran seems to admire a certain Bill Gates, who in turn is promoting Windows Starter Edition as all that India needs.
Windows is an easy OS, but starter edition is so low on features, that learning Linux to that level is just as easy.
yeah, well, like the inability of opening more than 3 windows!!
but I wouldn’t comment on the price of WindowsXP, as no one takes off Apple’s head for pricing OS X similarly & its just a desktop environment over FreeBSD!! and if every operating system becomes free, then I think that the motivation to innovate in them would go, possibly even for Linux distros as they would loose their biggest ‘wow’ factor, that they are free.
I guess MIT took my advice
and changed the colors.
yeah, looks like that!!
$100 Laptop, Destined to Fail ?
There’s been a lot of hype surrounding this project that is the brainchild of Nicolas Negroponte, but one look at similar attempts from the past shown that the future of this project may not be as rosy at it seems. In the past, there have been s…
I am very sorry to see that u think of it at that way,but i am damn sure many are there who are willing to sacrifce their text books and story books if they can get hold of one of theese.It’s a shame to see that the Indian government
is scoffing this matter off as an experiment by the western nations.I think they
are afraid that the comp comapanies wiil lose out big time if they allow the 100$ project here.Lastly i HATE this capitalist minded govt who can fill their piggy banks and say giving a laptop to a kid will ruin his eyes..