The US$100 laptop

I was privileged yesterday to get to see a US$100 laptop in the flesh courtesy of one of the team working on developing it. If you've not come across the One Laptop Per Child project and the US$100 laptop then you might like to spend 17:34 watching this video of Nicholas Negroponte explaining the vision behind the project at TED¹ back in February 2006. It's come on a long way since then.

It's a cute little machine (you can find the full spec here).

The keyboard will remind old hands of the early Sinclair machines mind you. What impressed me were three features:

1. The screen is a combined "transmissive" colour screen and "reflective" black and white screen. So they've got a colour screen, like an ordinary laptop, that works fine indoors but as usual with a laptop hammers the battery and a black and white screen which works better outdoors, or indoors in reasonable light, and gives you 15+ hours of battery life. So in one stroke they've solved the problem I'm sure you've experienced of using your laptop or colour display mobile phone outdoors and they've also got a big increase in battery life on the back of that.
2. You can swivel the display around and turn it into a tablet PC. Combine that with the mono display and you've got an e-book reader with a long battery life. Cute.
3. It has wireless networking (the "ears" are the aerials). Nothing clever there you're thinking. But the clever part is that it knows how to become part of a "mesh" network. So rather than you having to have a wireless access point every 50m around the school or village the laptops peer with each other and can share data. So if you've got a book on one laptop it's readable from all of them. And if you have got a WAP then the laptops nearest to it talk to it and can get Internet access. Those further away get access via the mesh. So if one of them can see the Internet then they've all got Internet access.

All in all it's a very cool piece of kit and the vision behind it is extraordinary. I understand they're currently costing nearer US$200 but Negroponte always anticipated the cost being higher initially and the weak dollar probably isn't helping either.

1. TED is a conference bringing together people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (hence "TED"). The annual conference brings together "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers", who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). The videos of the talks really do make fascinating watching. I can see me returning to this in future blog postings.