The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) board of directors today announced that Quanta Computer Inc. of Taiwan was chosen as the original design manufacturer (ODM) for the $100 laptop project. The decision was made after the board reviewed bids from several possible manufacturing companies.
In announcing the selection of Quanta, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, "Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away."
Quanta has agreed to devote significant engineering resources from the Quanta Research Institute (QRI) in Q1 and Q2, 2006, with a target of bringing the product to market in Q4. The launch of 5-15 million units will be both in large-scale pilot projects in seven culturally diverse countries (China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand), with one million units in each of these countries, and an additional modest allocation of machines to seed developer communities in a number of other selected countries. A commercial version of the machine will be explored in parallel.
"Quanta would like to contribute its industry-leading laptop technologies to the future success of the project, in hope of affording children worldwide with opportunities not only to close the 'digital divide,' but also to bridge the 'knowledge divide.' This project signifies a new stage and scale for the laptop industry by including those children never before considered to be laptop users," said Quanta founder and chairman, Barry Lam.
As envisioned, the $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3X the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a Delaware-based, non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty members from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. The pricing goal will start near $100 and then steadily decrease. The corporate members are Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat.
