The One Laptop Per Child project hopes to lower the cost of its laptop for developing nations to $50 by 2010, Nicholas Negroponte said in the opening keynote at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston.
One Laptop Per Child is supported by the United Nations and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Negroponte heads up the Media Lab.
Project’s Goal :
The project was kicked off in January 2005. Although the technology is the most visible aspect, the project is not about creating low-cost hardware, according to Negroponte. “The $100 laptop is an education project, not a laptop project. The motivation is to eliminate poverty,” he said.
Working with computers, and especially programming, helps children to structure their thinking, Negroponte argued, because a single programming error can cause an application to fail. Providing each child with a laptop therefore empowers them to advance their education in addition to investments in schools and teachers.
Investing in more schools and teachers "is not going to solve it fast enough ", according to Negroponte. “You’ve got to leverage the children,” he said. “The children have to be part of their own education much more than they have in those parts of the world.”
Roadmap :
The project has already raised more than US$29 million in funding, and hopes to have millions of the devices in the hands of children by next year. Initial discussions have already been held with the governments of several countries, including China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand, and the project is still exploring the possibility of offering a commercial version of the device.
The first units are scheduled to ship in December this year or January next year at an estimated cost of $135 per unit. Technological advances are expected to bring down costs to $100 by 2008 and $50 by 2010, Negroponte told delegates.
It hopes to ship five to 10 million units in 2007 to Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Nigeria and Thailand. Scale is key to getting a low cost laptop, he claimed, because it creates a market for the low end hardware that is needed for the project.
Laptop Specs :
The laptop will feature a 500MHz AMD processor, a 7in screen and built in radio Wi-Fi wireless networking. A wind-up crank will provide power.
The device’s most unique feature, a hand crank that could recharge the batteries, has been dropped. Apparently, tests showed that the crank generated too much twisting force on the small plastic prototypes; repeated use by eight-year-old boys would be more than the units could handle.
Negroponte is aiming for the device to feature a dual-mode display that combines a backlit display used in Western laptops and monochrome LCD display using sunlight such as the ones deployed in pocket calculators.
The technology does not currently exist, but should be ready by July or August this year, Negroponte predicted.
Rivals :
The One Laptop Per Child project hasn’t been receiving much love lately from either Intel or Microsoft, but that’s not going to stop Nicholas Negroponte, he told the crowd that “when you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you’re doing something right.”
Microsoft and Intel have publicly criticised the project, claiming that it is wrongly focusing on the cost of the hardware.
Negroponte says that he can’t understand why Microsoft, especially, continues to bash the product when they are involved in developing a version of Windows CE that will run on the device.