Having given up on its fantasies of creating a $10 laptop back in February, India has finally placed orders for a total of 250,000 units of OLPC laptops for its school children. OLPC India’s CEO Satish Jha comments that up to 3 million OLPC laptops are expected to be shipped to India before the end of the year, but for now the only sure figure is 250K. Whether the OLPC laptops that will be delivered to India are running on AMD chips or VIA C7-M processors wasn’t specified, however, it’s sure to be light years ahead of any $10 laptop they could have put together.
Meant to replace chalkboards that are still in use in some parts of the world, a tablet PC called I-Slate was created by researchers using the probabilistic CMOS technology designed by a certain Dr. Krishna Palem and his team at Rice University. It was formally announced during the IEEE’s 125th Anniversary event, and is supposedly solar-powered, WiFi-enabled and has support for stylus input. One day, the makers hope to see their chip embedded in all sorts of devices besides the I-Slate tablet like cellphones and TVs. But for now the use of their technology will be limited to their creation, prototypes of which are scheduled to get distributed in India this spring.
It may sound spooky and eerie, but yet it could be a powerful endorsement of a product with a worthy cause of giving poor kids a laptop. With the help of modern digital technology Beatles singer John Lennon who was shot in 1980 was resurrected and “remastered” digitally to promote the OLPC Project.
Yes folks, believe it or not John Lennon as an endorser of the OLPC XO Laptop. The ad spot which started playing last Christmas day was with full permission of course from Yoko Ono, John’s wife who was supporting the movement.
And in the video, John Lennon was saying:
“Imagine every child no matter where in the world they were could access a universe of knowledge. You can give a child a laptop and more than imagine, you can change the world.”
What do you think? A good promotional strategy or a poor try?
There is two ways to buy the laptop, in Give 1 Get 1, people pay US$399 for two XO laptops, one sent to a child in a developing country and the other sent to the donor.
Those who don’t want an XO OPLC laptop can also simply give as many laptops as they want at $199 each.
Here is the specifications:
Rugged, low-power, low-cost, wifi capable
7.5″ High resolution, Dual mode – 1200×900 B&W, grey scale, sunlight readable reflective mode; 800×600 color with backlight
Built-in camera (640 x 480 resolution at 30 FPS), touchpad, gamepad, 3 USB ports, SD card
1GB NAND Flash, Linux-Based OS included, 256MB DDR RAM Memory
Finally, the OLPC XO laptop will soon be accessible to individuals who have been wanting to take part in this worthy cause. OLPC has announced that it will start selling the XO Laptop through Amazon.com on November 17. The XO Laptop will sold through Amazon the G1G1 program where individuals will have to pay for one laptop for the price of two units. The other laptop will be donated to a corresponding child in a developing country.
This would certainly help the OLPC in getting more mileage on their worthy project. However, there seems to be one glitch on this deal. The OLPC XO laptop that will be sold in Amazon will only have the Linux OS. No Windows XP version will be sold. I wonder how easily the recipient kids would be able to adopt to Linux as an OS for the XO?
The XO Laptop will initially be sold through Amazon’s US storefront only but there might be chance that it would also be available in other countries later on.
PC World is reporting that Amazon will bring back its Give One Bring One promo for OLPC’s XO netbook this coming November and will run until end of December, just in time for the Christmas shopping rush most probably. Actually, said promo was announced as early as June 2008 but it is only now that Amazon is finally launching the promotional gig for the said netbook, possibly to shoot up its sales figures.
Once launched, the promo will run only for the United States customers. Although there is a possibility that it will also rolled out for customers residing in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
If Amazon makes this official, we’re pretty sure that others even non-netbook fanatics would be interested to avail of the promo if only for the sheer good purpose that it aims to fulfill – that is to provide kids from underdeveloped areas an XO laptop of their own.
Hopefully, should Amazon push through with this promo, that they would make this as a global campaign. And finally, this could be the start of the fullfilment of the OLPC’s cause.
PC World
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