At a big press conference yesterday MIT Media Lab Chairman Nicholas Negroponte and Tablet pioneer Alan Kay presented a glimpse at their $100 hand-cranked laptop to be targetted at children.
The bright green and yellow laptop has a similar charm to the first orange Tablet prototype that Bill Gates showed at Comdex a few years back.
The proposed design is expected to have:
* AMD 500MHz processor
* 1GB Flash memory (no hard drive)
* A unique DVD-player-sized display that is capable of color as well as a low-power, outdoor-readable black and white mode. Uses LEDs for lighting display.
* wireless mesh network
* Touchpad on front and an additional cursor control on back of case
* Linux OS
* Four USB ports
* Rubber encasing (not sure if it is replacable)
* AC adapter doubles as carrying strap
I haven’t seen anything about whether there will be a digitizer in the display (although this article suggests a digitizer is included and I think previous articles suggested it too), so it may not be a Tablet as in a Tablet PC. But it does have a nice reader-friendly Tablet mode.
One point to keep in mind here is that the $100 price tag is more talk than reality at this point. It’s a goal. Current price estimates start at $115. I’m guessing that when the product actually hits manufacturing that the price will be even higher once all the costs come in. In fact, there are plans for making a commercial version that would be priced around $200.
The original intent was to target the laptop to children in emerging countries, however, Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is suggesting that the state purchase 500,000 units for all middle school and high-school students. Other states are supposedly interested too. This could have a huge impact on Tablet adoption in schools–effectively creating a standard based on the Linux OS’s tools in terms of content, ink, and the P2P protocols defined by the $100 laptop. I can see the laptop potentially influencing online content too.
Google, AMD, News Corp, and Red Hat are all involved in the project.