$100 Laptop currently £95 November 9, 2007
Posted by bobharding in Blogroll, weblinks.trackback
Production of the $100 laptop (OLPC) has started with the first real order (from Uraguay).
To make production viable 3 million units will need to be made and currently only 250,000 have been ordered so costs are a bit higher at $188 (£95).
An alternative is the Eee PC from Asus (out any day now, costing a similar price.
I ordered an EeePC from RM to have a play.
There is a review of the eeePC in this months PC Pro. They say that it’s a real contender.
Naturally it doesn’t do ‘everything’. In particular you’ll need to get applications that run from a memory stick but Linux has loads of these I believe, you could do most things a school would want to do and at no cost.
Battery life is about 3 hours and this may be the killer for school use, perhaps a booster pack could be used.
Cost seems to be in the £180 range a bit high possibly but ‘affordable’ and it would fit in the typical bag.
Couple all of this with a Virtual PC running Linux for classroom use (so you could has a similar environment on a desktop) and you’d have a very flexible solution.
All in all a very promising option I’d say and well worth a trial. I’ll have to see if I can get to look at one.
Already hacking …
This site has details about releasing the desktop and how to install XP (if you want to)
:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/06/eee-pc-tips-a-crash-course-in-linux/