Montevideo (Uruguay) - The Uruguayan government has become the first to place a mass order of "$100 laptops", purchasing 100,000 computers for children aged 6 to 12.

 

---

The $100 laptop up close and personal ...

---

 

The project, founded by Nicholas Negroponte, originally aimed at providing laptop computers to children in developing countries at $100 a pop.  The computer became known as the "$100 laptop", however the price has been driven up over the past several months and it now stands at $188.  The computer is also called the XO laptop.

Negroponte called Uruguay's move groundbreaking and said "We commend Uruguay for being the first country to take concrete actions to provide laptops to all its children and teachers and look forward to other countries following this example."

Miguel Brechner, president of an education and technology project in Uruguay called Ceibal, said the 100,000 computers was just an initial order and that Uruguay will purchase 300,000 more "to cover the rest of the country later in 2008 and Montevideo in 2009," reports the BBC.

American customers can still participate in the "Give 1 Get 1" program, wherein they purchase one XO laptop for themselves must must also buy another one for a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, or Rwanda.

sweet

Oct 30, 2007 23:37     

god i've been waiting since they first made the announcement that they were going to sell to the general public to buy one. these things are going to perfect for when i get deployed to iraq. now i just need to transfer all my music and videos to sd cards...
andrew report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

affordable eBook Reader

Oct 31, 2007 09:38     

I read that one could use it for ebooks. This would reduce the cost of getting books to people since all they would have to do is upload it to the XO. This is a good idea not only for third world countries but also for developed ones too. It would reduce the weight of the backpacks/bags students carry by combining the books in the XO in ebook format. :) Its small size makes it very portable. It would be neat if it had an OLED (organic light emitting display) or an E-Ink display. Both of which use little engery (the latter using even less since it does not require power to keep the image on the screen but only to change it) making the batteries last longer. http://www.oled-display.net http://www.eink.com (IIRC on the URLs).

TomLeeM/BigWarpGuy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0