Via BoingBoing, here’s a link to a Flickr set of pictures of prototype versions of the “$100 latop”. You can follow progress on the One Laptop per Child project on their website.
if you haven’t looked closely at this project, here’s a summary of the laptop’s capabilities, from the project’s FAQ. One note about these machines, which threw me for a while, is that they don’t provide traditional networking support, since they are intended for use in locales that lack ubiquitious Internet connectivity. Instead, they will support a peer-to-peer mesh network, which presumably can connect to the Internet if it is available. (The USB ports also provide a means to connect via external dongles.)
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.
posted May 23, 2006 by eric
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