Project is about education, not about hardware

The One Laptop Per Child project hopes to lower the cost of its laptop for developing nations to $50 by 2010, Nicholas Negroponte said in the opening keynote at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston.

The first units are scheduled to ship in December this year or January next year at an estimated cost of $135 per unit. Technological advances are expected to bring down costs to $100 by 2008 and $50 by 2010, Negroponte told delegates.

One Laptop Per Child is supported by the United Nations and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Negroponte heads up the Media Lab.

It hopes to ship five to 10 million units in 2007 to Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Nigeria and Thailand.

The project was kicked off in January 2005. Although the technology is the most visible aspect, the project is not about creating low-cost hardware, according to Negroponte.

"The $100 laptop is an education project, not a laptop project. The motivation is to eliminate poverty," he said.

Scale is key to getting a low cost laptop, he claimed, because it creates a market for the low end hardware that is needed for the project.

Working with computers, and especially programming, helps children to structure their thinking, Negroponte argued, because a single programming error can cause an application to fail.

Providing each child with a laptop therefore empowers them to advance their education in addition to investments in schools and teachers.

Investing in more schools and teachers "is not going to solve it fast enough ", according to Negroponte.

"You've got to leverage the children," he said. "The children have to be part of their own education much more than they have in those parts of the world."

Negroponte is aiming for the device to feature a dual-mode display that combines a backlit display used in Western laptops and monochrome LCD display using sunlight such as the ones deployed in pocket calculators.

The technology does not currently exist, but should be ready by July or August this year, Negroponte predicted.

The laptop will feature a 500MHz AMD processor, a 7in screen and built in radio Wi-Fi wireless networking. A wind-up crank will provide power.

While initial designs had the crank integrated into the laptop, the project has since decided to move it to the power adapter.

Microsoft and Intel have publicly criticised the project, claiming that it is wrongly focusing on the cost of the hardware.

Negroponte hit back at the two companies. "When you have Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you're doing something right," he said.