A $100 Laptop for the Developing World
This has been MIT Media Lab leader Nicholas Negroponte’s baby for a couple of years, and it’s finally reached fruition. Witness the $100 laptop (via John Dvorak) that can be hand-cranked when electricity is unavailable:
The machine’s A-C adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there’s no electricity. They’d be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunchboxes. For outdoor reading, their display would be able to shift from full color to glare-resistant black and white.
And, as you might suspect, the thing runs Linux, not Windows.
Of course, the crank only gets you 10 minutes of juice for one minute of cranking. The exercise the kids will get will offset their new-found computer-using sloth.
Negroponte hopes to get up to 15 million of these in production this year. Personally, I’d prefer to see that $1.5 billion spent on feed and housing poor people, but then I generally favour a bread-before-books approach. After all, you can’t eat a laptop.
