Posted on Saturday, March 31 2007 @ 18:31 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The company behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project
says it will sell cheap $200 notebooks in the developed world later this year.
According to Quanta president Michael Wang, the company plans to leverage the underlying technologies associated with OLPC's XO laptop to produce laptop computers that are significantly less expensive than conventional laptops.
The OLPC project, which hopes to bring inexpensive Linux-based laptops to the education market in developing countries, selected Quanta (the laptop manufacturing company that produces mobile computers for HP, Dell, and Acer) to produce the individual XO laptop units. OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte says that OLPC has no plans to make XO laptops, which are "designed for the poorest and most remote children in the world," available to ordinary consumers in developed countries. OLPC plans to sell the laptops in bulk to governments, which will then distribute the hardware to school children.
