Taiwan-based Quanta to build laptop computers for US$100
Quanta computers Inc., the Taiwan-based computer manufacturer has been selected to be the Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) for a project of $100 laptop computers which is being funded by a non-profit organization named (OLPC.)
Quanta Research Institute has approved to dedicate its noteworthy resources of engineering in the first half of 2006 while the tentative time of the product launch will be in the fourth quarter.
Large-scale pilot projects will be launched with around 5 to 15 million units in seven countries, which include Brazil, Egypt, Argentina, China, Nigeria, Thailand and India. One million units will be launched per country in these culturally diverse nations. Furthermore, there will be a limited share of machines in other selected countries.
OLPC based in Delaware, was created by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty members from the MIT Media Lab in an effort to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are reasonably economical so that every child in the world can have access to knowledge as well as other forms of education.
These Quanta manufactured laptops will be sold to governments and who will issue them to children by schools based on the one laptop per child policy.
The sturdy, Linux-based equipment can be switched on through hand-cranking alone. With the help of mesh networking, a number of machines will get Internet access from one connection.
While the initial cost of the laptop computer will be $100, the price is likely to reduce steadily afterwards.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corp. etc are some of the other companies supporting the cause.
Quanta founder and chairman, Barry Lam, said the organization would like to contribute its industry-leading laptop technologies to the future success of the project. Terming the project as a significant step, he hoped that through this venture, children who till now could not be bracketed as laptop users would get access to it.
Meanwhile, Quanta has stated that OLPC project will need huge support from governments as a number of software and hardware problems, prominent among them being handwriting recognition, translation, and panel issues will have to be solved. The budget for this production will be low-costing.
Apart from Quanta, the OLPC also held talks with Compal, Inventec, and Wistron for the project. The makers concluded that if all the software and hardware components were ready, mass production could start in five months time.
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