Negroponte Offers OLPC Technology For India's $35 Tablet

angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government's planned $35 tablet. In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology."

Comments

Negroponte is upping the ante

[kyz]

India is trolling - it can announce $35 tablets, even $0.00 tablets, but it sure as hell can't make any for that price. The components alone cost more than $35, and that's when China makes them with slaves paid less than India will pay.

Negroponte has been there, knows the truth, and knows that India is just there to swindle international news media to get attention for its own country. He's going to co-opt that attention for his own project. Good on him.

Re:Negroponte is upping the ante

[naz404]

This actually fantastic. The developer base left at OLPC is shockingly small and if they join forces with the India effort, they can really do a big impact with low-cost, energy efficient computing.

I really hate how the hardware world has gone into faster, faster, more, more when it should be working on cheaper and more energy-efficient. I'd rather that Moore's law went into making chips at current speeds cheaper than constantly expensive chips at faster speeds. Instead, what they do is phase out slow-cpu tech and keep selling power-hungry speed demons

On a related note, having an OLPC XO-1 unit in my hands, having gone through the internet on a Pentium 1 back in the 90s, I really hate the present AJAXification of the entire web - it's no longer possible to fully surf websites on a 400MHz machine like the XO-1 without having to turn off Javascript and Flash.

Javascript programmers are doing the very same thing that gave Flash a bad name years ago: Bloat.

Re:What could OLPC learn?

[Serious Callers Only]

It seems obvious how this might point the Indian project in the right direction,

What could India possibly learn from the rudderless OLPC project? They've lost their core software team, sold out to Intel then lost their support by foolishly trying to monopolise the low-end, sold out to Microsoft and then have been undermined by the MS drive for Windows netbooks, refused to deal with small deployments, *and* come nowhere close to their target price. About the only thing that has survived that project from inception is the glorious leader Negroponte. His promise today is worthless. The only thing they could learn from Negroponte is what not to do; over-promise and under-deliver, but unfortunately, given their silly promise of a $35 touchscreen tablet which they haven't got the tech for, it seems that boat has already sailed.

What India should be doing with this is creating a smart machine for $35, without a touchscreen (impossible to get a good one at that price), possibly with something like a trackpad, but the input method doesn't matter - make it a good ereader and mandate that it is used by all schools looking to buy tech for education.

That would give them the customer base to create a truly mass-market device, and the groundswell of interest and enthusiasm from bright young Indians to make it a success, and allow them to commission software for it that would really make a difference to education in a country which is dependent on it for its future. English is already the primary medium of instruction, and there are huge numbers of existing free texts in English which would make such a device incredibly useful to students everywhere, not just in India. Even just a web browsing device this cheap with a larger screen than a phone would be a breakthrough for many students.

Re:What could OLPC learn?

[shutdown -p now]

I think you're missing the point of OLPC - it's not so affluent people can buy lots of cheap computers, it's to offer access to the less privileged in the world.

Right. And the way to do it that stays is to flood all markets with cheap computers, driving prices down, so that the less privileged in the world can afford to buy one. A successful example of that is the adoption rate of cellphones in Africa.

As for the efficiency of all-planned and overprotective approach... how well is OLPC doing today, again?..