C/Net says the $100 laptop has moved one step closer to reality.
Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the Media Lab at MIT, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations.
Negroponte is in discussions with five countries–Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa–to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children.
The proposed design of the machines calls for a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory and an innovative dual-mode display that can be used in full-color mode, or in a black-and-white sunlight-readable mode. The display makes the laptop “both an electronic book and a laptop,” he said.
He said a goal of the project is to make the low-cost PC idea a grassroots movement that will spread in popularity, like the Linux operating system or the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia. “This is open-source education. It’s a big issue.”
The idea is simple. It’s an education project, not a laptop project. If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.”
Negroponte said the idea is that governments will pay roughly $100 for the laptops and will distribute them for free to students.
“This is the most important thing I have ever done in my life,” Negroponte said on Wednesday during a presentation at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT.
Negroponte say that connectivity is a non-issue. “Between WiFi, WiMax, 3G, 4G, etc, there are so many people working on the connectivity problem regimes are changing, there’s global competition, connectivity is happening [that problem] doesn’t need me, MIT or the Media Lab” said Negroponte.
During the presentation, Negroponte said:
“50 percent of cost of today’s laptops is in sales promotion, marketing, etc. We have none of that cost. The rest of it is the display and we have a lot of expertise working to bring the cost of that down to $35. As for the rest of the parts, at least 75 percent of it is there to support the weight of the operating system I’m not just picking on Microsoft. This is true of Adobe and others as well. Invariably, next release [of software] is worse than next one It’s gotten so fat, so slow, so obese, so unreliable that it’s time to start over and dumb it down with skinny Linux skinny open source.”
DailyWireless has more on the $100 Laptop.
