For the World's Poor Children, This Computes

FOR THE WORLD'S POOR CHILDREN, THIS COMPUTES
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Rob Pegoraro]
The most interesting new laptop shipped so far this year isn't sold in the United States. It's also missing most of the standard parts of a computer: a modem, a CD burner, even a hard drive. A machine without those guts might be considered a toy, and Intel's Classmate PC even looks like a pretend computer that you'd give to a kid. Indeed, this little 3.2-pound machine is built for children: students in developing countries. It's rugged enough to withstand being tossed around classrooms, yet it goes for about $225, bought in bulk, half the price of the cheapest name-brand laptops sold in the United States. Intel made this wireless-enabled laptop to goose the adoption of computers in poor schools overseas. Those institutions don't have the money to park a Dell Inspiron or Apple MacBook on every desk and don't have resources to support a classroom's worth of full-fledged computer work stations. You could say the same thing about many schools in the United States, too. And although the Classmate PC can't help them today, computers sold here next year or the year after might owe something to its design.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/AR2007071102540.html
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