November 5th, 2007 
Deepak Cheap Laptops Arrive for Tryout in India This is not a cost-reduced version of today’s laptop. It’s an entirely new approach to the idea of a laptop. The so-called $100 laptops for children may make it to India after all. Last year, India rebuffed One Laptop per Child, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off that created rugged little computers for kids in the developing world. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. A Non profit association, OLPC, is dedicated to researching and developing a low-cost laptop to serve as an educational tool for children in the developing world. The cheapest laptops on the market today typically sell for about $499, a price completely out of reach for most of the world’s children and their parents. The $100 laptop has the potential to transform education in the world’s poorest countries. AMD‘s chief strategy officer describes, “Our design of the $100 laptop as the first fundamental revisit of personal computer architecture since IBM launched the PC in 1981. Twenty-five years, and now, for the first time, we’re redesigning the whole architecture – hardware, software, display – and we’re coming up with some remarkable inventions and innovations.” The $100 laptop, which will have online capability, will also have features that most typical laptops do not. These include instant on, three to four times the range of WiFi antennae, a hand crank to recharge the battery, one-tenth the power consumption, and a higher-resolution display. India’s education minister was quoted calling the project “pedagogically suspect,” apparently because it demands children be allowed to take the laptops home to maximize exploration. Being shut out of the world’s second-most populous country seemed a defeat for One Laptop per Child, which has had a tougher sell than it expected. Mass production of its roughly $190 laptops is expected to begin soon, but with fewer than the several million computers originally envisioned. Even after hearing the minister’s comments, One Laptop Per Child kept talking to Indian officials, companies and non-governmental agencies. And a pilot test began recently in which 22 children in first through fourth grades in a rural, one-room school in the Indian state of Maharashtra are using the computers. Carla Gomez-Monroy, the education consultant who launched the test, said One Laptop per Child has learned that working with local partners will be crucial in India, where dozens of languages are spoken. It [...]
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