You know that $10 Sakshat laptop that Indian officials unveiled yesterday? Yeah, it’s not a laptop. I’ve been reading conflicting information about this device for the past few months. Sometimes it’s supposed to cost $10, sometimes $100. And sometimes it’s called a laptop while other times it had been referred to as a portable computer, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as a laptop.

Now that the first image of the device has popped up online, the picture is becoming a bit more clear. As I predicted last week, there’s no keyboard or display. The box is a portable device that’s about 10 inches by 5 inches, and which can store information. You can access that info from a full fledged computer. It sounds to me like this is a glorified USB flash drive, but it’s also supposed to be able to let users connect to the internet, so I’m guessing there’s some sort of processor in there.

The price right now is being pegged at closer to $30 than $10, but the goal is to bring the cost down so that the Sakshat doesn’t cost much more than a textbook. You know, unless you also want to plug in a monitor and keyboard.

via Engadget

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Indian officials formally unveiled their plans to create a $10 laptop today. And by unveiled, I mean they gave the project a name and confirmed everything that was already revealed last week but failed to produce a prototype or even a picture of a mockup stored in someone’s closet.

The laptop will reportedly cost closer to $20 at launch, but the time it goes into production in six months, officials are hoping to bring the price down to $10. The machine will be called the Sakshat laptop, and it will have 2GB of storage, built in WiFi and Ethernet, and it will use just 2 watts of electricity. And it may or may not be real. Information Week reports that some Indian critics have noted that the announcement comes shortly before elections, and $10 laptops developed by the government sure sounds like a nice campaign promise.

via Gizmodo

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Indian officials plan to show a prototype of a new portable computer next week that is in some ways the country’s answer to the OLPC “$100 laptop”В  The idea was to create a computer for students in the developing nation that could be sold for far below the cost of the XO Laptop, which actually costs closer to $200. How much below? Well, according to the folks behind the Indian computer, it currently costs about 1000 rupees or $20 to make, but the hope is that once mass production starts it could hit 500 rupees or $10.

There’s not much information about the $10 computer yet. It’s described as a portable machine, and in some instances I’ve seen it called a laptop. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a light weight box with a CPU and some storage that students can carry from home to school and plug into a monitor. It’s one of the only ways I can imagine the price would be so low. But I guess we’ll find out for sure next week when the prototype is unveiled.

The Indian Government is hoping to work with private firms to manufacturer the device which could be available in six months.

via Slashdot

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Sure, research analysts at Gartner may say the mythical $100 laptop is at least 3 years away. But apparently the folks at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore never got the memo. Because IDG News reports that they’re developing a laptop that will be sold for just $100, (not $10 as earlier reports suggested)

Now let’s be clear, there are a lot of things we don’t know about this laptop. Will it be the size of a ping pong table and weigh 70 pounds? Maybe. But it will be cheap. You know, if it ever graduates from the vaporware stage.

It’s also not clear whether the PC will actually be worth just $10 or if the government will be dumping huge subsidies into the project to make the computer as affordable as possible. While India certainly has an up and coming economy, there are huge portions of the country that have little or no access to the internet. If these cheap computers use some sort of mesh networking feature like the one included in the OLPC XO Laptop, they could go a long way toward bridging the digital divide.

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