$100 laptops lined up for February test pilot

 

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Posted on 3 Jan 2007 at 12:51

Children in developing countries will get the first $100 laptops as early as February.

The first computers, from the One Laptop Per Child project, will be test machines, with volumes building towards an official launch in July 2007.

The XO laptop is currently expected to cost around $135 to produce, although MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, who leads the project, forecast that that figure could drop to $50 once real volumes are established.

The first countries to receive the laptops are to be Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, Thailand and the Palestinian territory. Negroponte told the AP news agency that three more African countries may sign up to the project in the coming weeks, while the Inter-American Development Bank is working on introducing the XO machine into central American territories.

The basic spec of the XO hardware has already been fixed: a wind-up battery is the most salient feature, while a 366MHz AMD chip, 512MB of Flash memory to store data, USB ports and wireless connectivity, make up what would be considered an under-powered machine in the US and Western Europe.

However, the real breakthrough appears to be the operating system. Codenamed Sugar, the lightweight Linux-based platform is unlike any other interface. It abandons the idea of folders, and instead lets users locate files based on a journal system, which records the projects they have been working on.

The interface has a stick figure at its centre, signifying the user, around which a white ring displays currently active programs and a black frame contains icons to launch whichever program the user desires. Other users within range of the wireless device are displayed as further stick figures in the black frame and can be used to view photos and other work, allowing for collaborative projects.

The controversial element to this is that it defies the idea of learning about computing, and focuses on making computers work to let children do the creative things they want to do.

'One of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint,' Negroponte told AP. 'I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.'

Despite the focus on usability, versions of the operating system will be localised for each country, and One Laptop Per Child will send in a mentor to each school for a month to get things rolling.

But it may be this exotic outlook that has alienated the likes of Microsoft and Intel, the latter of which has launched similar initiatives in its Discover the PC and World Ahead Program projects.

The One Laptop Per Child has secured some $29m in funding from the likes of AMD, Red Hat and Murdoch's News Corp.

Author: Matt Whipp