Slashdot Mirror
India Hopes to Make $10 Laptops a Reality
sas-dot writes "We all know Nicholas Negroponte's $100 OLPC. India, which was a potential market, rejected it. India's Human Resources Development ministry's idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project. So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labor charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops."
I have to say
a) The ministry in question has never ever (to my knowledge) developed anything that can even remotely be called technological hardware.
b) The CPU, the RAM and many of the other components will have to be imported because India doesn't have a single factory that makes them.
c) Is it even remotely possible to buy in bulk a laptop-grade battery for $10 ? My low-end cellphone battery costs (retail) more.
d) What will the machine boot from ? a hard drive ? Flash? SSD?
e) IF a laptop is being designed for India, it will have to support Indic languages. And as someone who works in Indic computing, the best input methods/rendering backends involve QT, GTK or MS. (Despite working on the wretched problem for years and years and spending crores of the taxpayer's money, there's still no reliable input method for entering Devanagari text on the 80x25 console.) MS is out because there's no way you can build an x86 based or WinCE based machine for $10. Maybe some ARM+Linux based machines could run QT/GTK. But, again, $10 seems awfully low.
*sigh*
Aniruddha Shankar
The Indian ones are usually quite shoddily built. I remember one, retailing for around Rs 200, in which the left parenthesis key didn't work. The general feel was quite clunky. Complex operations like integration took a hell of a lot more time on it.
I'll stick with Casio, thank you.
As someone below has pointed out, the Human Resources Development ministry hasn't put out one thing of technological repute. This laptop will probably be as bad as that calculator -- if it isn't really a wooden block, that is. After all, anything that can be placed on top of your lap could possibly be called a laptop.
They should have gone for the OLPC laptops and called it a day. It would have saved a lot more money in R&D.
Any reasonable Indian, when he comes across this story and finds the news hyperlinked to "Times of India" is sure to ignore the news and wait for information from more worthy resources. TOI, has an habit of creating all news as sensational, and some times to the point of 'formatting a misleading' news. The project could have been yet-another-cheap laptop project with no relation to any price tag or information on OLPC.
Senthil
Actually, I AM an Indian. I live in India, and I have as much faith in the government as an atheist has in God.
You may be interested to know that I don't get electricity for more than 18 hours a day in the summer months -- and that a large percentage of the population still lives in huts.