Uruguay buys first $100 laptops
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Uruguay becomes the first country to place an order for the low-cost children's laptops.
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In the next eight days, crews will perform tasks to prepare for the installation of a European laboratory.            Presented By     From Dell? Home!      &nbsp;&nbsp;The new Dell? Inspiron? 1520 notebook with hi-def widescreen and long-range wireless for only $799. Add mobile broadband for $150. Limited time offer. Click here. www.dell.com    Ads by Pheedo
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  has unveiled a low-cost Internet access device that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time technology users in the developing world.
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(InfoWorld) - Some of the low-cost PCs designed by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for kids in the developing world will go to people in North America. That's the result of a program the group plans to launch on Monday that will let U.S. and Canadian residents pay US$400 for one laptop to keep and one to give to a child in a developing nation. Initially, at least, purchasers won't be able to choose where the second laptop will go. "The idea is to help feed programs in the least developed countries and broaden the community of engagement," said Walter Bender, president of software and content for OLPC. By putting the laptops in the hands of people in North America, the group hopes to persuade more people to contribute content or other developments to the project, he said. The offer will start on Nov. 12 and run through Nov. 26. "We don't want to divert too much away from the developing world, so we'll do a short window," Bender said. Mass production of the laptops is scheduled for October, with the first units landing in the hands of kids around the world in early November, he said. The initial run will generate 40,000 units and production will quickly double and triple that capacity to meet demand, he said. The original plan for the OLPC project was to create a laptop that would cost less than $100, but more recentlyÂ the price has been pegged closer to $190. The $400 deal for two laptops includes some padding for the cost of sending one of the laptops to a remote location, Bender said. Â
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Little, cheap and sturdy, laptops designed to bring technology to the children of developing countries are rolling out after years of promises. But don't expect them to do much for high-tech kids in the U.S.
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China's largest manufacturer of personal computers Lenovo Group said it has bought IBM's PC business for 1.25 billion dollars, making it the world's number three in the intensely competitive field.
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Via Technologies, best known for chipsets and tiny motherboards, announces a new design for budget ultramobile computers. Its Nanobook will weigh 1.9 pounds, be capable of running Windows Vista and cost less than six bills.
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(InfoWorld) - Ten years ago this week Sony launched its first Vaio laptop computers. The PCG-705 and 707 went on sale in Japan on July 1 and were followed quickly by a desktop PC, as Sony tried to show the world that a consumer electronics company could make computers. Many homes in Japan didn't have a PC at the time. They relied instead on dedicated word processing machines that fell somewhere between electric typewriters and laptop computers. But the launch of Windows 95 helped expand the PC market in Japan, in part by offering an interface more friendly to Japanese users. With its first laptops under its belt, and a desktop that had been on sale in the U.S. for a year, it wasn't long before Sony had its first computing hit: the PCG-505 laptop. The 505 launched in Japan on Nov. 20, 1997, and was 2.4 centimeters thick, which at the time made it "ultrathin." It had a 10.4-inch screen and a 133MHz Pentium MMX processor and was priced at about $2,500. Its slender design, in silver and lilac, attracted much attention and helped to distinguish its laptops for several years. "After probably five years we had a little bit of a struggle because competitors were catching up," Bob Ishida, president of Sony's Vaio business group, recalled in an interview last week. "We were struggling with how to further differentiate our products so we focused on some of the basic concepts that we had since we started our Vaio business." One key element of Vaio notebooks, reflecting Sony's experience in consumer electronics, has been attention to multimedia. Sony was quick to adopt the IEEE1394 interface, for transferring data quickly from cameras and other devices, and a prime feature of its first desktop for Japan was a hardware MPEG encoder -- something unusual at the time. Sony was also one of the first to try andÂ push PCs into the living room, and scored a big hit in 2002 with the Vaio W. The main body of the machine was built behind the flat-panel monitor, and its keyboard folded up over the lower half of the screen. That meant the computer took up little more space than a laptop when not in use. The Vaio W proved such a hit in Japan that shops had waiting lists for them and Sony cancelled TV commercials to cool demand until its manufacturing could catch up. The Vaio's success has been significant because it showed that a consumer electronics brand could enjoy success in the PC market -- a feat that computer makers have tried to achieve in reverse but without the same success. The challenge ahead for Sony will be to see if its strengths in computing and consumer electronics can help it remain a significant player in the digital home. That will depend partly on the reception for the TP1, a "living room" PC intended to sit alongside a television. It was introduced earlier this year and is circular, about the size of a hat box, and works with a wireless keyboard and remote control. It includes digital video recording and users can search through the subtitle information to find particular scenes, such as the mention of a football match in a news program. Ishida predicts big changes for the home PC market over the next 10 years. "A lot of people are using a PC for the Internet, but at the same time the younger generation, like my son who is just 12 years old, isn't using a lot of PCs but using cellphones," he said. Sony has stopped selling its Vaio desktop PCs but its laptops should remain strong, according to Ishida, in part because they are widely used in the business world. But in the home, look for devices like the TP1 that merge computing with consumer electronics. "By making the PC much easier for the customer to use there's going to be less and less boundary between the product categories. PCs and consumer electronics products are getting closer and connectivity among those products is going to be more important," he said. Asked what people might see more of in the future, Ishida cited the WA1, a Vaio home audio device that receives music streamed via Wi-Fi from other devices on a home network. Â
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Demand for Linux-based laptops drives the Dell announcement.
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Also: High security built right into $100 laptop's OS. Read these stories and more from around the Web at News.com Extra.
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By Serdar Tumgoren, The Dispatch, Gilroy, Calif.  Mar. 7--GILROY, Calif. -- City council has voted to buy its members  $1,750 laptop computers, though not all officials think the expense is  justified.   Councilmen voted 5-2 Monday night to authorize the purchase.
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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) has teamed up with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to launch a pilot project in Haiti, the first time the group will be able to comprehensively evaluate the idea of giving laptops directly to students as a learning tool.OLPC, which makes&#160;the $188 XO laptop&#160;aimed at kids in developing nations, will contribute $2 million&#160;to the project, while IDB will provide a $3 million&#160;grant. The project aims to distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools, the groups said in a statement.The organizations are financing the project to test whether the use of laptops in schools on a one-to-one basis can improve teaching and learning in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world.&quot;We have studies about the impact of computer labs and shared computers in the classroom, but there&#39;s never been a comprehensive evaluation of the learning model based on giving each child a laptop,&quot; said Emma N&#228;slund-Hadley, the IDB&#39;s project team leader. &quot;This is crucial to determine the effectiveness of this model under conditions of extreme poverty and as a tool for accelerating learning.&quot;One aim of the project is to determine how the laptops can be used to help solve problems such as a shortage of qualified teachers, as well as educating children of different ages and grades in the same classroom. The Haitian government hopes the laptops can help speed up the learning process for students who enter school late or have to repeat grades, according to the release.Teachers and students will be trained how to use the laptops and carry out basic maintenance and trouble shooting. Some students will receive vocational training to handle more complex laptop repairs.The project will be evaluated by UNESCO&#39;s Regional Office on Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, which will conduct standardized math and language tests before and after the pilot project to determine performance improvements. Observers will also gauge whether the laptops affect attitudes and behaviors regarding school management, the value families place on education, the use of laptops at home, and the perceived educational progress of the students.The OLPC project started as an attempt to build a $100 laptop and work with governments to pass them out to kids in poor nations, but the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount at first. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope high-volume sales of the device will drive down costs.The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that&#160;the price of a PC&#160;is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how software, the Internet and communications via computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers.&#160;
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China's Lenovo Group Ltd   introduced its first consumer computers in the United  States on Wednesday, expanding in a region it entered in 2005  with the purchase of IBM's PC business.
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Wal-Mart and Linspire announced on Monday that they are now offering a basic Linux laptop for under US$500, the first laptop to be offered new below that price point.
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c50453)  has announced the addition of "Computer  Hardware in Brazil" to their offering.
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Company's $185 machine will debut in India, Mexico and Caribbean and feature browser, e-mail and word processor.
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Bigger help desks, good news all round The launch of Microsoft's Vista will create 100,000 jobs in the US, the same as that claimed for Europe, but will bring in almost twice as much cash - some $70bn.â¦