The One Laptop Per Child project, the effort undertaken by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with dozens of technology industry partners, has announced that it will ship nearly 2,500 of its $150 laptops to eight nations this month according to an article on ZDNet.
The shipment will function as an experiment prior to mass production of the laptops, which is set for July 5th when five million of the units, dubbed the XO, will be built. Prices for each laptop should fall from US$150 to US$100 (thereby matching the project’s long-standing nickname of the “$100 Laptop”) and fall below US$100 in production costs per unit when the project hopes to supply 150 million laptops worldwide.
Education ministries in Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand and possibly Ethiopia and the West Bank will receive the initial machines before the program expands to Indonesia and other countries.
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The One Laptop Per Child project, the effort undertaken by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with dozens of technology industry partners, has announced that it will ship nearly 2,500 of its $150 laptops to eight nations this month according to an article on ZDNet.
The shipment will function as an experiment prior to mass production of the laptops, which is set for July 5th when five million of the units, dubbed the XO, will be built. Prices for each laptop should fall from US$150 to US$100 (thereby matching the project’s long-standing nickname of the “$100 Laptop”) and fall below US$100 in production costs per unit when the project hopes to supply 150 million laptops worldwide.
Education ministries in Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand and possibly Ethiopia and the West Bank will receive the initial machines before the program expands to Indonesia and other countries.
The laptops will include features such as an open-source Linux operating system, unique LCD screen that can switch from a color resolution to a black and white resolution depending on available lighting conditions, a “salad spinner” string pully which replaces the previous design’s hand crank and can kinetically charge a battery, one minute of spinning equating to 10 minutes of run time, Flash-based memory and a built in webcam. The laptops can also effectively operate in low power environments, requiring only two watts of power to function as opposed to a typical laptop’s 30 to 40 watts of power.
The devices also boast mesh networking functions that can allow the laptops to create ad-hoc wireless networks with each other on the fly and security features which shut down the units if an authentication code hasn’t been received from a server computer, either locally or via the Internet.
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