My friend sent me the link to the launch of the $199 PC by Everex. It was indeed quite interesting to read about since I have been following the MIT’s $100 laptop plan for a long time now. I am sure that Negroponte is definitely wondering, how the hell did this happen so quickly?
Well, I dug in a little further just to find out what exactly these two offerings are and how different are they?
Well, let’s start with the more well known one
The $100 laptop
This is a product created under the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) vision with the help of MIT Media Lab. Nicholas Negroponte has been working on this for at least a couple of years now and it is finally a reality. I have not personally tried the laptop, but there are others who have. Here is a pre-review!
The most interesting and innovative feature of the whole laptop is that it can be charged mechanically. A few winds ensures that it is good to run for another half and hour. Given that it is designed to work in the most remote African village, this is great!
From the latest news we know, the $100 laptop is actually going to priced very close to $200 ($182 from what I last remember reading).
Now for this Everex and gOS based machine: $199 PC
This machine is built to have all of Google’s products and was confused as Google’s OS. The clarifications can be found here. The most amazing (strange - however you see it) part is that these are only available through Walmart? (Is that where Americans are buying PCs these days?? ) I thought Indians bought a funny places, but buying PCs at Walmart is definitely a new thing to me and worse yet, it seems to be exclusively available just there! What’s the deal in that?
Another interesting thing about this $199 PC is that it is powered by VIA (which is probably the third largest PC chip company after Intel and AMD). Interestingly, VIA has shown a clean value proposition in building such cheap hardware and obviously there are lots of advantags to doing that. Once the cost of the PC goes down (like the telephone instrument), it’s uptake goes up… More people using it means more outreach of software and more necessity of broadband (making PC broadband also highly inexpensive esp. in a country like India). If the dream to put a PC in every village has to be realized, hardware like this needs to be created! After all, people don’t really need super powerful machines. They just need to be able to the basic Office stuff and perhaps use the internet for communication, tele-medicine and getting info about their business (primarily agriculture and commodities). More about the Indian need and situation in another post.
This as well as the $100 laptop are powered by Linux and other Free/Libre Open Source Software (a philosophy that the start up I work with believes in passionately). The similarities are amazing and yet each tool has it’s own distinct value proposition.
Let’s see how both of these inexpensive machines pan out!
