$12 Computer ? What's that ? Is it real or just a joke for today ?Actually this is real project and being developed right now.
While Nicholas Negroponte Phd and his team prepare second generation of OLPC Laptop called XO-2 to be ready at lowest price level $75, a new and even lower price proposition arise and it's not coming far from Negroponte's old graduated Institute: MIT.
A group of MIT's fresh graduated student come with the idea to use already market available hardware in India as base platform for their product. (Actually this games console is imported from.................you bet right.....................China)
This product is a game console equipped with 2 joystick, 2 air soft gun, a mouse, and an integrated small cpu-keyboard (no RAM). It operates with plug into your TV.
6 person group member plan to add RAM, WIFI-internet, and offcourse : software to lift up this game console more suitable as education tools for children. So dont think about using this computer as your office platform.
Compared with XO-2 that planned to use Window beside Sugar (a customized Linux), the $12 computer project is far beyond real world mainstream application in the world today. So this $12 computer project is easily mis-interpretated as a "real world" computer. We think it is not. At least for now.
As second point is the $12 price. We think it is quite untrue since development stages will involve more additional hardware and new piece of software. But you may think the computer price will still below XO-2 because you dont need a monitor to use this computer. So as easy guess, think about $12 plus $75 devide by 2, we get arround 50 bucks. Still cheap though.
If this young product designer lead by Derek Lomas can achieve success with this project and make it distributable to development country, it would be a remarkable achievement. If they can make WIFI-internet works and web browser also works , then many student arround the world will get benefit and add many function that can be comparable with XO-2 project such us online distance learning.
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Picture source :
http://picasaweb.google.co.in/dereklomas/TVComputer ___________________________________________________________________
