$100 laptop program revisited

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Thu, 07/26/2007 11:58 AM

Rudijanto, Contributor, Jakarta

Tommy (not his real name) laughed when asked about the performance of the planned US$100 laptop known as Children's Machine that was announced in early 2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by the chairman of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Nicholas Negroponte.

Without a hard disk and equipped with a tiny display screen, such a laptop would not be able to meet the requirements of today's professionals, but such a laptop may be sufficient to provide school children with digital experience.

Powered by a CPU using 433 MHz AMD Geode LX-700, the $100 laptop, also known as the XO-1, appears antiquated. However, the 256 MiB of Dual (DDR266) 133 MHz DRAM as written in the March 2007 hardware specifications makes the laptop fast enough for child users.

The use of IEEE 802.11 to form the wireless mesh network enables the laptop to gain Internet access although the data rate across this network would not be high. However, the data rate should be sufficient for asynchronous network applications such as e-mail.

To ensure that the cost of operating the laptop remains low, all of the software will be free and open sourced using, among other things, a pared-down version of Fedora Core Linux as the operating system, a simple custom Web browser based on the Gecko engine used by Mozilla Firefox, a word processor based on AbiWord, e-mail through the Web-based Gmail service and online chat and VoIP programs.

If the laptop project runs as scheduled, children in developing countries will be the first beneficiaries. Under the OLPC program, governments of developing countries will pay and/or subsidize the price of the laptops for children. Through this program, the digital divide between those in the developing world and those in advanced countries is expected to gradually disappear.

But perhaps all this sounds too be good to be true. As of March this year, the price of the XO-1 had already increased to US$175 and Negroponte revealed that the project was at a critical stage.

The reason is that there has been no certainty regarding which country will pay cash for the laptops. In addition, for mass production and distribution, total orders for the XO-1 need to be three million units. However, Negroponte expects that the laptop will be mass produced in October 2007.

However, it is not clear yet where orders for three million units will come from. From the countries initially mentioned as buyers of the laptop - Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand and CambodiaThailand has withdrawn from the project now that there has been a military takeover there.

India has rejected Negroponte's offer on the OLPC program. Indian Ministry of Human Resources Development even plans to make laptops for as low as $10 for schoolchildren. A final year engineering student of Vellore Institute of Technology and a researcher from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have come to an estimated production cost of US$47 per laptop.

Some critics have said that the poor children in the jungles of Africa and forested areas of Vietnam and Cambodia need electricity and basic school infrastructure more than they need laptops. In addition to its rising price, governments in the developing countries cannot help but calculate the maintenance costs of laptops provided to their schoolchildren.

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