Slashdot Mirror
2nd Generation "$100 Laptop" Will Be an E-Book Reader
waderoush writes "At a conference sponsored by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation this morning, OLPC founder unveiled the design for the foundation's second-generation laptop. It's actually not a laptop at all — it's a dual-screen e-book reader (we've got pictures). Negroponte said the foundation hopes that the cost of the new device, which is scheduled for production by 2010, can be kept to $75, in part by using low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players."
Bye bye books. We'll miss you!
Maybe schools in the states can get these and stop spending my hard earned cash on books. Oh wait, they already paid for them. I used the same book my mom used in high school (her name was on it!).
Maybe Microsoft can kindly provide the OS for that one too, for a mere 40% of the cost of the device.
I have some beach-front estate to sell. It is not near any beach and it is actually a chair.
But can it run Linux?
If you had read the article, the original, version 1 of the OLPC laptop will be $100. This new version has no price set in it's unveiling.
OLPC's goals have gone from providing a platform that allows full intellectual expression and room from growth and development, to running XP so maybe kids and type a book report or something, to now merely being a way to passively consume printed media?
And last week I thought that this project couldn't get any farther from good.
And ask for a DS Lite with 2 bigger screens.
...because it seems it definatelly can be used as laptop, thanks to dual touchscreens. (and calling it E-Book reader...hm, I think we settled what that term means and XO-2 isn't exactly it...)
I wonder what OS will be there...
One that hath name thou can not otter
with the XO-1 mass produced in 2007, and the next generation only 3 years later, in 20010, how do they intend to get the economics of scale to bring down the cost of the XO-1
First the OLPC redefines the low cost laptop market, now this? The Kindle now seems a bit overpriced at $399.
Negroponte said the foundation hopes that the cost of the new device, which is scheduled for production by 2010, can be kept to $75, in part by using low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players...
... and in part by waiting until 2010 to make it. In two years you'll be able to buy a used first-gen iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle for $75. At least he's aware of it: "Negroponte said the foundation plans to bring out the second-generation device by 2010. By that time, he added, the cost of the original XO Laptop will also have been brought below $100."
Also, the "low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players" bit worries me some, since those displays don't have a particularly high pixel density. Who wants a 7, 8, 9" screen to read from that's only ~720x480? Yeah, it'll work, but it'll be far from ideal.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Doesn't the OLPC use a lower power screen? How does the battery life with these cheaper, power hungry screens? It would kind of defeat the purpose of this if you could only use it for an hour without plugging it in...
Until they come out with an ebook reader that has a full color, 200+dpi (reflective, not emmissive) display that itself is letter-size or larger (or perhaps a tabloid-sized dual screen display that folds in half a little like opening a book), I'm just not interested.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...because I definatelly can't see such devices around me...and it would be sort of nice.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I have nothing but rage and contempt for Negroponte and the OLPC project. I will not support a project that betrays its contributors by abandoning the principles that motivated them.
Windows on the OLPC is an outrage and clear evidence that the OLPC project is no longer about helping children and only about making money and creating a new form "Microsoft Tax" for the poor and developing nations.
Its bullshit. Its like giving money and time to a charity called "one meal per child" and find out it has decided to use your contribution to bring dollar off coupons for McDonalds happy meals.
Gimme a book, baby! A printed, dead tree book! And when you geniuses figure out how to make a monitor that reads like a book, then I'll switch - cost is not a factor.
So in the three years it takes to develop, the price will slowly rise to $300. And it will, of course, run Windows Vista.
-- This void intentionally left null.
All this noise about cheap laptops. But they're not. Is anyone going to use an Asus eee for a general purpose device? No. It's a glorified web browser, PDA and possibly a big ass phone. In the meantime all the cheap laptops will disappear and become 'portable multimedia centers'
I can still get a low and Thinkpad R61 or Lenovo N200 for $500 and for $200 more than that Asus piece of crap you get an actual laptop. Of course we'll never actually see a $200 laptop. Instead it will be a $200 MP3 player with a keyboard.
Forget the kids. I've been waiting for this ever since it first showed up in 'The Mote in God's Eye' by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Where the heck has the industry been on this one? Oh, right. They were in their Podzone.
Negroponte said the foundation hopes that the cost of the new device, which is scheduled for production by 2010, can be kept to $75
Is that 75 Real Dollars, or $75 Negroponte Distortion Field Dollars? And it'd be nice if the press actually took a stab at how realistic those "hopes" are- I mean, I hope that someday I'll shit strawberry-flavored lollipops while driving in my flying car, on autopilot while I bonk my supermodel wife...
Please help metamoderate.
Finally. A hybrid e-paper and LCD tech design in the form of a book. I have been thinking about this for a while, and it just makes sense. For internet applications, use the LCD screen, while for extensive reading you would use the e-paper display. The best of both worlds.
I am curious if Mr. Jobs is to plan such a device. Remove the keyboard from the MacBook Air, replace it with an e-paper display and make the LCD multiple touschreen sensitive. Some software on it for functionality like "dragging" the PDF file to the e-paper display, and we're set.
I'm just confused by this. My initial gut reaction is that Negroponte wants to completely scrap what came before, and put his own stamp on the project. But that makes no sense, because it was his project, and his stamp was on it already.
They will be able to sell this new device for under $100, this time for sure. Okay, I'll agree that using standard DVD player screens might help. But why two screens then? Isn't the screen the most power-hungry part of the device? The OLPC screen has special power-management features; won't standard screens burn more power? And won't having two screens double the power?
The article spoke of "dual touch screens". At first I thought this meant "multi-touch screens" but now I think it just means both screens will be touch screens. Even so, how do you make a standard DVD player screen into a touch screen?
And once again. Why two screens? Yes, it looks more like a book. Big deal. This dual-screen design has a hinge! It's got to be easier and cheaper to make a slab tablet device, with maybe a hinged cover (note that a cover has no electrical connections and need not break a waterproof seal).
So, no keyboard; just an onscreen virtual keyboard. I'm guessing no onboard camera, since none was mentioned and they are being aggressive about price. Not one word about openness of software stack... Negroponte just doesn't care anymore, I guess.
The OLPC project hasn't just jumped the shark. They went out and found a new shark and they are jumping over it now.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I thought the current OLPC screens were special high DPI screens which were perfect for reading, as opposed to generic portable DVD screens?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Why after all this time can the current screens on the OLPCs not be made cheaper? In nearly 5 years the best they'll have improved on is lowering the price, and making it look worse and less functional? Surely they are trying to address some unique challenges, but this is horrid.
The worst part however is that these screens simply suck! Think of the children! In 20 years we'll need One-Set-of-Glass-Per-Child (OSoGPC).
Tibbon
tibbon.com
With the recent Micro$oft involvement in the OLPC project this question suddenly is relevant.
I feel really sorry for all the good folk who helped the now-damned OLPC project in good faith only to see M$ subvert and destroy it by killing* Negroponte.
*seducing to the dark side
read High Tech Heretic by Clifford Stoll for a lot of great insight into the books vs computers debate for education
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The Nintendo (DS) already has an operating system for dual screens. Negroponte will end up putting games on the ebook anyway because thats the only reason kids wanted the original OLPC.
Now kids will be able to get Penthouse beamed directly to their mud huts!
OEBPC doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
As if there weren't enough proof that OLPC was a lie and a multi-billion dollar scam, now St. Nick is dropping the "Laptop" part of OLPC, and it will now be "One Poorly Designed DVD Player Without The DVD Drive Per Child".
Way to go. It's "all about the kids", so long as the kids are being forced to use Teh Lunix and FOSS.
Anyone care to speculate why waderoush would want to crash his own servers?
/.
Until I ad a few more servers to the farm, I wouldn't try direct linking from the front page of
Currently I have 3MB fiber, 2 Opteron 2.0GHz with 4GB, both pointing to a 8 core xeon with 6 spindles and 8GB Ram... I was going to ask yall how long you think it could take the load, but there's a lot of difference between posting index.php and spacer.gif... So nevermind.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
While the Asus eeePC is not perfect, it certainly is a general purpose device. I can do almost anything on my $350 eeePC that I can do on my $1800 desktop.
I bought it rather than a full notebook because it weighs two pounds (rather than 6 or 7) and is the size of a small book.
I'm sorry that you didn't like yours, but it isn't meant as a desktop replacement.
Is the subliminal message 'MS is good' included?
With current market trends, I'm willing to bet it will be a combination palmtop with cheap phone service/data plan attached, and built in software for coupon shopping/bargain hunting with a fliptop compartment on the cover that contains makeup space and a mirror.
I actually mean that semi-seriously
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
It's NOT an "eBook Reader", it's a laptop designed like scaled up Nintendo DS, a dual-screen clamshell. Calling it an "eBook Reader" is a travesty.
New hardware is nice and all, but it's really of minor importance compared to the elements of the platform that should be there to help kids learn. I think there's a reason that the press never covers how fantastic and ground breaking the educational aspect is. The technology is interesting, but as far as I can tell, the educational aspect is an afterthought.
...and for $200 you can get into the buy-one-give-one program.
Despite all the knee-jerk reactions (including the author of the article) to this being a glorified e-Book... it is NOT. It is clearly much more than that
It is a functional laptop in an eBook-like shell. Just look at the pictures. There is a pic of a kid holding the thing like a laptop with a virtual keyboard on the bottom display, and a game being played on the top display. This indicates that it has much more than eBook capabilities, and likely incorporates multi-touch capability.
...Windows XP?
It saddens me that my $200 is going to be going toward 67 Windows licenses instead of something useful. With this 2nd gen XO.... I don't know. The screen looks too small to do anything with, kids or no kids, and there's no way they're going to get cost and power consumption down while keeping decent performance. No idea what Negroponte is thinking. I love my XO-1 (typing on it right now, with Xubuntu), but I have no intention of supporting the project in the future if they bow down to the M$ tax.
We are well on the road to a Hitchhiker's Guide or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This is absolutely the right direction for low-cost ubiquitous computing.
Exactly it's not meant as a 'replacement' for anything. It's another gadget. You make my case.
Now someone mod this troll above.
Well, that's certainly a way to deal with all those XO keyboards falling apart - not having a keyboard at all.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
You can't take the sky from me...
If Negroponte had the integrity of ... of ... a Steve Ballmer, he wouldn't have talked about price. He would have made some mild self-deprecating joke about having been wrong before, and limited himself to giving reasons for price not being a problem, or price not being what OLPC was really about, or for it not costing more than the first-generation machine despite the fancier screen... and left it at that.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I modded my EEE with a touchscreen. It uses a DVD derived 800x480 display, so basically it's about what he's proposing. In the shade, it's fantastic, in the sun it sucks. Good, but pretty much trivial using relatively simple resources.
they(poor people in Africa) need access to potable water. cheap computer ($100) is not really cheap for them.
We had wiki text books when I was in school 20 years ago. Well, at least the text books I had were "edited" by the student that had them before me.
If then can get down dual-screen fancy touchscreen laptop down to $75, why not get 1st gen XO down to $20 instead?
I think 3rd world governments would rather buy cheaper laptops than cooler ones.
Is it just me or is this so stupid as to being ridiculous?
Last I checked the OLPC was all about providing a cheap alternative for kids growing up in undeveloped countries (or however you want to PC poor or 3rd world countries). The intent being to offer them some opportunities they might not have otherwise have had.
An e-book reader?
I will do one better. I will design and create a new exciting technology, that will last for hundreds of years, require no power or recharging, and is 100% recyclable.
I call it a "Book"! Amazing!
Seriously, if that is the issue, print some cheap books, and ship then over. Better yet look into the practices by the publishing companies which are brutal. Legislate some change there to help everyone, even domestically!
Nobel Peace Prize here I come!
As long as it can read every format I care about, I'd happily pay $200 for a dual-screen e-book reader that uses the XO-1's sunlight-readable display technology. (Very low power requirement, high res, and - unlike epaper - can be used in the dark.)
but with the poor-quality screens found on low-end throw-away DVD players. You seriously do not want to be reading text on those screens.
The system will employ the dual indoor-and-sunlight displays, which was pioneered by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. The monochrome mode is high resolution and much easier on the eyes the lousy DVD player screen on the Asus eee.
Of course, this whole project could be vaporware.
It also has Wi-fi and can browse the internet. ...The main problem with the e-book nature is in the licensing. Most ebook DRM protocols are Windows based or proprietary.
all it needs are nice friendly letters on the back that say "Don't panic"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am now firmly convinced that the OLPC is the West's retaliation for the Nigerian spam scam. We didn't start this battle with the African continent (ok, maybe we did) but, by god, we are going to finish it.
That's what I'm interested in. I can imagine a completely configurable keyboard, all the better to play games in. And when you need the extra screen space, you can make it go away. I've never seen anyone try to implement this on a keyboard and still expect to touch-type with it though, but I'm hoping that it's going to be a standard feature on new notebooks.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Forget the fact that each third world country involved could have the ability to put an entire localized grade school to high school curriculum in each machine.
XO's were/are interactive. Let's cripple them, install MS and give out empty readers to people with little or no connectivity!!
*** Don't be dull.***
Ignore the slashdot headline. Read Mary Lou Jepsen's blog, http://www.pixelqi.com/ for the technical vision.
Mary Lou's vision of the next generation of display technology is:
- Daylight readable
- Color
- Fast enough for video
- Embedded Wireless
- Touchscreen
- Embedded solid-state storage
- Extremely low power (1 watt)
- Embedded battery
- Battery life measured in days, not hours
- Embedded processor
Mary Lou's point is that with a machine like this, who needs a heavy-weight OS? Just about everything one needs on the OS side would already be in the hardware.
These are clearly the ideas behind what Nicholas is describing.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Well, after he sold OLPC 1.0 to Microsoft, how can he trump that for OLPC 2.0? Easy: sell out to Amazon. The device may be $75, but the DRM will be priceless. Instead of running Sugar on Linux, it sounds like it may run Amazon's reader on WinCE.
Seriously, Mr. Negroponte, make up your mind what you want people to volunteer for. An eBook reader? A constructionist learning device? A low-cost laptop to sell stripped down Windows versions to the developing world? When you figure it out, maybe the volunteers will come back.
But don't bet on it.
Nice theory. Except: the professors assigning the textbooks aren't usually the ones making the money from them.
Like it or not, good textbooks cost a lot of money because few people can write them and students are willing and able to pay those prices.
Why are few people able to write them? Because tenure committees and university boards demand publications and grant money and that's what professors have to spend their time on. Writing a textbook is a career limiting move, and professors simply don't have the time to create their own teaching materials from scratch, given all the other obligations imposed on them.
If you don't like that, go to a teaching oriented school, and/or complain to your university and state legislators that they should set different priorities.
Wrong. What the EeePC replaces is the need to carry around a 6 pound notebook computer. It is a "notebook replacement" rather than a "desktop replacement". So, if you need a big screen to do your work properly, or access CDs/DVDs/Floppys or run a MythTV box, or if you have big thick fingers, or have trouble seeing small print, the Eee is not going to cut it. It is a small sub-notebook with only a few ports, speakers, microphone, and a webcam and almost no peripherals and low processing power. It is not a perfect solution...but it is not just a gadget...it is a general purpose device that made a few sacrifices for weight and size.
It's not an ebook. The keyboard was replaced by touchscreens. Does it support multi-touch? Anyway it looks great, and less movable parts less trouble.
The big problem is that they leave out the content. Creating textbook content is key and requires a serious investment to match the curriculums. Yes, textbooks are expensive (and profitable), but much of the cost is in creating the content and customizing the content for each school. The problems with eBooks isn't the hardware it's having enough content. Amazon is semi-close with Kindle. Reading for pleasure will likely never happen with eBooks but it could work for education with enough of a commitment.
Negroponte's close but, as usual, the Media Lab orientation is light on content and high on concept.
So you work for Yahoo and Steve Ballmer made an offer?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That's why there are still 10-20 year old texts on the market. It's a chicken and egg problem: schools don't have the budget to spend so nobody writes new books so there is nothing worth buying so the schools don't budget for new books.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You're always going to have some kid who doesn't read well off of a computer screen compared to a paper copy. I for one, am one of those. There are so many other things i could be doing on a PC and call it ADHD or whatever, but i just can't focus when on a PC and trying to read something. Books are always going to be published, Kids will read them.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
I suspect that the ebook readers will support DRM, so that the current industry of textbook makers will be appeased enough to produce books for this thing.
If I'm correct, it's just one closer step towards Stallman's right-to-read fiction. While it's fiction, it's still possible...and scary.
The XO has a quite sufficient PDF reader. It's not perfect (it gets a little chokey on big files) but it handles most files perfectly well.
I don't have DRM-infected files.
Let me see if I have this straight. OLPC could not get under $200 for a single display. So they will now have 2 displays and it will only cost $75. From the prices I have seen it seems like the displays are the most expensive part of a laptop. Using these figure I'm guessing that $50 should give me a holographic display but I could be smoking the same dope Negroponte.
Remember that this is the guy who sold the world the XO under the promise that is would be open educational software...and then reneged and went to a cut down version of MSWind.
... but I don't trust him enough to even read the details of what he's promising.
I, personally, see no reason to trust his assertions. He might mean what he says
I would not pay money for his promise. I would not build plans around his promise. AFTER he starts selling his device, I'd consider whether it offered something that I needed, and whether it could be maintained if (after) he defaulted on service. If not, I wouldn't do business with him. If so, he could get in line with everyone else. I trusted his promises and intentions once.
Every one deserves one chance if the cost isn't too high. (An overstatement, but it's the simple way to say it.) They don't deserve two. The second chance only comes if you've repented your errors from the first time, and he hasn't. Even then it's a harder sell than the first time.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
the entire project needs to be forked away from laptop.org, both hardware and software. Then it could just be an "anyone who wants one" little machine, like through a co-op for bulk hardware purchases. Most of the design specs are available and near as I can see the really expensive bits involve the display. which might be fixable. It needs to be reintroduced with the original idea of onboard power generation (or at least a foot pedal), and just use a low bloat normal linux distro for the software and dump sugar as reinventing the wheel..
Until they come out with an ebook reader that has a full color, 200+dpi (reflective, not emmissive) display that itself is letter-size or larger (or perhaps a tabloid-sized dual screen display that folds in half a little like opening a book), I'm just not interested.
That's okay; you weren't the target market anyway.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
3rd Gen OLPC - Windows Zune Video Player preloaded with Barney & Friends
In March and April Ivan Krstic and Walder Bender, two of the most famous technologists of the project left the project, with the following feedback to the community: Maintaining Clarity: http://radian.org/notebook/maintaining-clarity and Where is Walter: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012986.html
May 13th, Ivan Krstic, the man behind the security system in the XO-machine wrote a much harder critic ( http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi ) against the OLPC project talking about the recent complete change in direction the company has taken, taking orders without knowing how to ensure the 700.000 machines actually end up where intended as orders are often taken to places where even no postal services go?
- Is it true that "learning" never was part of OLPC's mission?
- Are OLPC simply accepting orders without knowing how to deliver?
- Are the machines ending up in the right hands?
- How is theft and corruption prevented?
- Does the project really need to link the interface to the underlying OS?
For gradeschool and even highschool, the material is simple enough that it wouldn't take that much to get the job done
Only a geek could be so naive - or forgetful:
Its founding fathers are dead, its disciples scattered, its millions long spent. Yet countless Americans still carry the revolutionary message of new math in their memories, if not always close to their hearts.
Before the results could even be measured, new math became a near religion, complete with its own high priests and heresies.
Where did new math go? And what happened to all those schoolchildren ready to experience, as one writer called it, "the wonder of why"? Whatever Happened To New Math
The public school curricula is under perpetual assault from all sides.
No subject - and no method of teaching - is ever free of controversy. That is the reason why the third world education minister shies away from projects as ideologically freighted as the OLPC.
That is why your local school board doesn't want its choice of textbooks dictated by Washington.
I can't speak to the sciences too well, but in literature, the main costs for textbooks are copyright fees, printing, and publisher profits. That's why it's hard to get textbooks with lots of contemporary literature and why textbooks with poems tend to only have short poems--Walt Whitman being represented by a dozen-line poem, for example.
In the sciences, I do know that the actual cost of the book's printing is significant because they tend to use a four-color process, and that's pretty expensive. It's actually amazing to me that you can get a thousand page biology text book in color for less than a $100, especially when a thousand page black and white literature text with no current copyrights applying costs $175 (I'm thinking of the Emily Dickinson variorum from Harvard UP.).
The one person I knew at my last university, a Big 10 research school, who edited a literature text did it not for money but for publication credit. When I've submitted editing work for a textbook, I got $0 compensation. My compensation was my name in the fine-print acknowledgements page, which increases my chances of getting a decent-paying job by 0.005% or so.
Teaching gets a lot of lip-service from politicians, but when you freeze raises and hiring, you end up with teachers teaching 130 students per semester, and then it's really hard to make sure all the noses are on the right grindstones, much less to assign challenging work (which is challenging to grade).
Other factors apply too: I ended up with one class this semester in which I couldn't even fit in the room with my students. I taught my first few meetings from a chair in the doorway, until two students dropped and freed up the "teacher's" desk for my narrow ass. Last semester I taught in a building slated for demolition and so old that I had to stand perfectly still when lecturing, or students couldn't hear me for the floorboards creaking. I'm not kidding; that was the damndest thing I'd encountered on a campus.
Even small issues like photocopying have become an issue. I can't make a lot of instructional handouts because I'm not allowed sufficient copies on the departmental photocopier.
Ugh. I could go on. No raise for me this year, even though I got "excellent" on my student and peer evaluations. There's a pay freeze, so I need to keep figuring out how to live bringing home two grand a month with student loan payments beginning. Frankly, I don't know how I'm going to do it.
Seems to be a lot of comments about what this thing isn't. How about a discussion of what it is? Its a brand new format device, toy, whatever. On the plus side from a kids point of view, isnt it cool that you can play with it with your friend at the same time rather than just sit in front of it on your own? Form a grown up point of view, can I have one with wifi and bluetooth, so I can then read slashdot on the bus in full format, then connect my bluetooth mouse and keyboard once I arrive at the office and have to type in some reminders for my shopping list?
I remember reading a novel by Harry Harrison in the "Stainless Steel Rat" series, in which he described "collectors of universities" who had entire libraries of universities on chip. The more (and most unusual) chips you had, the better a collector you could "preen yourself" to be.
If the new OLPC is going to be a DVD player, or an E-Book reader, or some combination of all of those and the original OLPC (yes, I have read many of the earlier posts)
why not add a large collection of text books and general reading - built in.
Maybe a standard portable DVD / BlueRay player with a BlueRay disc (or collection of discs) in a box, or in a "multi-disc stack" drive would mean getting a whole lot of info out there, and at a cheaper price.
How big a solid state drive can you fit in it, and how much info can you cram in the drive?
Never mind connectivity, put lots of structured information in their hands, and minds. If they can also be creative, so much the better. But "INPUT!" as Number 5 said.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
Regarding the lack of tactile feedback, you make an excellent point. Luckily, there's been some innovation in that area. Immersion makes a touchscreen that vibrates vertically when one touches "buttons". Apparently, to the user, it feels like tactile feedback. Adapting such a technology would go a long way towards the more widespread adoption of touchscreens (which, even you will probably admit, are more useful than touch-less screens).
Regarding Sugar, on the other hand, you are dead wrong. The Desktop Metaphor is an ugly relic of the Xerox offices of the 70s. Subjecting millions of third-world children to "desktops" and WIMPs would be nightmarish, especially when there is a better alternative. It is so incredibly inhumane that I don't even know where to begin listing arguments and references against it. So, I'll give you just two. First, everyone should read The Humane Interface . Seriously. Second, read the Sugar Human Interface Guidelines, to see all the reasoning behind it. After that, come back if you still want to subjects these people to "grown-up" interfaces.
My laptop weighs maybe a shade over 5 lbs. It has a 15.4" screen, 2GB ram, 120GB drive, dual core Intel. It runs about 4-5hrs on a new battery. I think the extra 2.5lbs is worth it. Maybe not to you but to me it is.
It's a T61 Thinkpad and maybe it costs $740.