$100 laptop for poor children unveiled

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, has shown off his prototype $100 laptop at the Tunis World Summit on the Information Society.

The ruggedised laptop, which includes a crank for generating its own power, is being developed under the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which aims to allow children in the Third World to own their own PC.

Negroponte said that his non-profit organisation is currently negotiating with manufacturers and will have an initial order placed by February or March.

Thailand and Brazil are among the six countries that have showed the strongest interest so far.

The final design includes a low-power display designed to run for up to 40 minutes in black-and-white mode with one minute of cranking.

The current specs include a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory and a unique dual-mode display that can be used in full-colour or in a black-and-white sunlight-readable mode.

Negroponte confirmed that the laptop will run an open source operating system, probably Linux, rather than a proprietary product from Apple or Microsoft.

Companies including Google, AMD, News Corp and Red Hat have so far donated to the project.

The laptop currently costs $115 to manufacture but Negroponte hoped that the price would drift closer to the $100 target and even lower as production volumes increase. He said that some governments were not able to pay $100 per machine.

Commentators have pointed out that if the laptops are given to children in poor families which may have an income of less than £2,000 a year, there may be a strong temptation to sell the device to help feed or clothe the family.

Negropronte maintained that distributing the device through government education departments will help reduce this risk.