Check out the Pixel Qi LCD screen technology, provide e-ink quality ereading and very low power consumption when turning off the backlight, and you can turn on the backlight to get the full color qualities of regular LCD screens as well when you want to browse the Internet or watch some movies. All on the same screen: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/08/charbax-tests-pixel-qi-at-ces-2010/
It's a bit like the Chicken and the Egg problem. You can't really use laptops to read textbooks.
Once students all have low power readable tablets at $99, the affordable if not totally free access to all books and all textbooks is an obvious development.
Even if the publishers will want to keep prices of digital versions of textbooks high, students will very easily be able to pirate them. This will force a new business model to monetize the work of authors. Such as one that is already used with libraries. Borrowing books from the library is free while authors are compensated directly accordingly with the popularity of their work through some sorts of taxes. Authors whos books are in libraries are compensated by how many times people borrows their books, which could be even more precisely counted using e-readers by counting the actual exact use and popularity of each ebook page.
It's as good as e-ink for reading. Check my video: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/08/charbax-tests-pixel-qi-at-ces-2010/
I tested it only for a few minutes though, I didn't actually read much on it, just had time to check it out outdoors and indoors at Computex 2009 and at CES 2010 as I was filming those Pixel Qi videos.
It's very very readable and the whole 10" screen currently uses less than 500 milliwatts which means potentially reaching 50 hours battery runtime using an ARM processor to turn e-book pages on a 3-cell netbook-sized battery.
They need to reach ARM Cortex A9 or good A8 with full hardware acceleration of Google Android for Laptops or Google Chrome OS software and Flash 10 support for full speed web browsing. Once they have that, which is really imminent, they will be selling huge amounts all over the market.
isupply.com usually makes Bill Of Material calculations on all these devices. They and other such industry analysts websites can inform on the component costs. Smart phones like iphone and Android phones are usually below $150 in Bill of Materials (+/- $30 depending on the screen quality and quality of other few components used) and it's usually below $10 in manufacturing costs.
If they are paid $2 an hour, it definitely doesn't take them 2 hours to assemble one such unit. Look everywhere for manufacturing costs of the iphone or any other Laptop, the actual cost to manufacture is always below $10.
Surely if Google designs a perfect one and launches manufacturing of 10 million units, they can make them at $60 a piece and sell them on google.com/laptop for less than $100 also subsidized further by Google's online ads. The biggest cost of the laptop is the screen, using Pixel Qi the battery life can be upwards more than 20 hours even with a small cheap Laptop battery.
Exactly, the telecom companies are dictating cell phone prices. If it weren't for those telecom companies, we would be able to buy unlocked Nexus Ones for less than $200 at the moment.
Nexus One has faster ARM Cortex A8 processor, AMOLED screen, built-in HSDPA, better battery, 4x more RAM memory, kind of justifies why a Nexus One costs $150 to manufacture and this 7" laptop probably costs less than $80 to mass manufacture.
If you can read the full Slashdot homepage on 480x320 3.5" iphone screen, then surely you could read it too zoomed on a 800x480 7" screen (4x the size and 2.5x the resolution compared to the iphone).
Though surely a 8.9" 1024x600 resolution screen would be nicer and would fit in the same form factor and maybe only add $20 to the cost of this device.
Yeah, logically it should be rather easy to put scroll bars, use up/down buttons for quick scrolling, remove touchscreen zoom options, move applications menu to the bottom left corner (like the Windows Start menu), and provide a Google Marketplace which filters apps that are best suited for laptop form factors. Optimaly, the full Chrome browser should launch within Android for Laptop form factors. I expect this is something Google will release soon.
This specific model doesn't have a built-in HDTV output, but my guess is that adding a HDMI output connector might not have to increase cost by more than $5.
The point of this video is to show that Android and the much faster Android web browser can make all these cheap laptops much more usable when it comes to browsing the web. The Android browser is 100x better than the one in Windows CE or the previous Mozilla-based one they would integrate in those $100 Laptops. More usable means more people will want to buy it, which means even cheaper prices.
Archos 5 Internet Tablet with Android (8GB) $249
Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet (250GB) (the one for using the new Dev firmware) $199
Nokia N900 $649 - Has 2x smaller screen than Archos, much less storage, no HD 720p video decoding, no video recording
The Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet for one has a 3-4 times faster ARM Cortex A8 processor, basically like the processor in the Nokia N900 which costs 700 dollars and has a tiny screen.
Archos has always been able to playback all the video codecs at least up to DVD resolution.
The Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet now ships with 250GB hard drive for $199 or the 7" version for $209, that's basically the price of a 8GB ipod touch.
Archos records TV using DVR connectors for input and output of composite, s-video, component and even with a HDMI output in 720p.
Archos has USB 2.0 host for keyboards, mice and external hard drives.
The fact that Intel does not WANT to lower prices does not mean that they COULD NOT do it.
If it weren't for Intel and Microsoft's monopoly on the PC/Laptop market, we would have had $50 Laptops that run 20 hours on a battery by now, with instant on and free wireless broadband worldwide.
ARM Cortex A8 at 600Mhz performs better than Intel Atom at 800Mhz for loading Javascripts on HTML websites.
Intel Atom 800mhz consumes more than 1W
ARM Cortex A8 600mhz consumes less than 350mW
Most other components of a computer follow Moores law as well, some other components evolve even faster than Moores law like certain storage technologies.
If you can double the amount of transistors per chip every 18 months, then you can also halve the size of the same amount of transistors. Thus you CAN halve the price every 18 months.
The reason Intel isn't halving the price of their processors every 18 months is not because they cannot, it's because they don't want to.
Doing whatever it takes to keep the prices high is the speciality of Intel. Old slower processors are being DISONTINUED by Intel before they are able to be manufactured for cheaper.
Just look at the average cost of processors sold by Intel. They kept the average sold processor costs steady between 2000 and 2007, and since the netbooks of 2007, the average price per processor sold by Intel has nearly halved.
The hardware may have problems, but you can't expect it to work better, given AMD did not support the project well enough to keep Geode up to date with the latest cost efficient components. And given OLPC only could afford the amount of engineers working full time that they could afford.
I absolutely don't see where Nicholas Negroponte should have been complaining about the Linux core developed by Ivan Kristic and the other engineers.
Although I am NOT an engineer and I do not know the details of what the actual work has been to make XO-1, I think Ivan Kristic is suffering from some type of frustration having done IMMENSE work, being the software genius that he is, but simply not having had the ressources required to realize all the visions perfectly thus far. And somehow feeling perhaps that his brilliant Bitfrost security mechanisms don't work yet as are intended.
That might lead to the choice Ivan Kristic then made to work for a much larger company Apple. Apple definitely has the ressources in those $20 Billion they have in the bank, to give Ivan whatever he needs to make his visions work.
The difference between having 12 engineers working with or for you (if Ivan was or wanted to be the CTO), and potentially 200 at Apple, means all the difference for him if he has to hack at code all by himself at OLPC with insanely tight deadlines that are always pushed back or to work more comfortably at Apple, get much more sleep, be much better paid.
Anyways, I'd much prefer if they'd all just agree that the evil is not within OLPC but that it has always been that the rest of the world does not let the OLPC vision become reality just that easily. And that it will take more punches to the industry to make it work for the Children and not only for the banks and shareholders.
Nicholas Negroponte has always argued that OLPC would only work towards Open Firmware supporting Windows on the laptops. Because he ALWAYS talked about Dual-boot support if ANY Windows Support at all!!!
Windows-only machines would never had been supported by OLPC funds.
Some Governments demand Windows support on the machines before they invest millions of dollars into such a project. That is why OLPC has worked on the open source Open Firmware ONLY, NOT ON THE HARDWARE, to support an eventual Windows port dual-bootable from a USB stick or from an SDHC card.
I hate Microsoft just as anyone else on Slashdot. Yet I also really hate when Linux fans act like complete idiots and bash on the worlds single BEST Linux hardware project EVER. Just because their totally open hardware somehow supports a Windows port also which Microsoft invested a lot of engineers for more than a year to have it working.
As much as I hate Microsoft, I would LOVE IT if Bill Gates announced tomorrow that he will finance $1 Billion to ship 5 million XO-1.5 in Africa running Windows (if he insists) but totally Linux dual-boot compatible as well, since THAT IS HOW OLPC MAKES THEM (providing each class with Linux USB sticks to either install a Linux dual-boot or to replace Windows eventually is easy).
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the Pixel Qi LCD screen technology, provide e-ink quality ereading and very low power consumption when turning off the backlight, and you can turn on the backlight to get the full color qualities of regular LCD screens as well when you want to browse the Internet or watch some movies. All on the same screen: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/08/charbax-tests-pixel-qi-at-ces-2010/
It's a bit like the Chicken and the Egg problem. You can't really use laptops to read textbooks. Once students all have low power readable tablets at $99, the affordable if not totally free access to all books and all textbooks is an obvious development. Even if the publishers will want to keep prices of digital versions of textbooks high, students will very easily be able to pirate them. This will force a new business model to monetize the work of authors. Such as one that is already used with libraries. Borrowing books from the library is free while authors are compensated directly accordingly with the popularity of their work through some sorts of taxes. Authors whos books are in libraries are compensated by how many times people borrows their books, which could be even more precisely counted using e-readers by counting the actual exact use and popularity of each ebook page.
Check the link, there is a picture of a working prototype at 10" and even a video of a working prototype with a 4.3" screen.
It's as good as e-ink for reading. Check my video: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/08/charbax-tests-pixel-qi-at-ces-2010/ I tested it only for a few minutes though, I didn't actually read much on it, just had time to check it out outdoors and indoors at Computex 2009 and at CES 2010 as I was filming those Pixel Qi videos. It's very very readable and the whole 10" screen currently uses less than 500 milliwatts which means potentially reaching 50 hours battery runtime using an ARM processor to turn e-book pages on a 3-cell netbook-sized battery.
They need to reach ARM Cortex A9 or good A8 with full hardware acceleration of Google Android for Laptops or Google Chrome OS software and Flash 10 support for full speed web browsing. Once they have that, which is really imminent, they will be selling huge amounts all over the market.
isupply.com usually makes Bill Of Material calculations on all these devices. They and other such industry analysts websites can inform on the component costs. Smart phones like iphone and Android phones are usually below $150 in Bill of Materials (+/- $30 depending on the screen quality and quality of other few components used) and it's usually below $10 in manufacturing costs.
If they are paid $2 an hour, it definitely doesn't take them 2 hours to assemble one such unit. Look everywhere for manufacturing costs of the iphone or any other Laptop, the actual cost to manufacture is always below $10.
Manufacturing costs in China are most likely below $5 per unit.
Screen is most of the cost, electronics only a small part, plastics even smaller, battery not an expensive high capacity one needed.
OLPC are working on something like this, and ARM Powered OLPC laptop, it is called the XO 1.75, it will likely be based on the Marvell Armada 610 or 510 processor, thus faster than this, and run 50 hours on a battery with the latest 100mw Pixel Qi screen, check my videos of that processor at CES 2010: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/18/marvell-slim-desktop-solution-ebox-based-on-the-marvell-armada-510-processor/ also running Chromium OS: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/14/marvell-runs-chromium-os-on-the-armada-510/
Surely if Google designs a perfect one and launches manufacturing of 10 million units, they can make them at $60 a piece and sell them on google.com/laptop for less than $100 also subsidized further by Google's online ads. The biggest cost of the laptop is the screen, using Pixel Qi the battery life can be upwards more than 20 hours even with a small cheap Laptop battery.
Check my other video with the founder of Epic Games: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/25/tim-sweeney-talks-about-unreal-engine-on-arm-powered-devices/ The full Unreal Engine and Quake3 type of OpenGL ES games and N64 and Dreamcast emulators can run on those ARM Powered Laptops.
Exactly, the telecom companies are dictating cell phone prices. If it weren't for those telecom companies, we would be able to buy unlocked Nexus Ones for less than $200 at the moment. Nexus One has faster ARM Cortex A8 processor, AMOLED screen, built-in HSDPA, better battery, 4x more RAM memory, kind of justifies why a Nexus One costs $150 to manufacture and this 7" laptop probably costs less than $80 to mass manufacture.
If you can read the full Slashdot homepage on 480x320 3.5" iphone screen, then surely you could read it too zoomed on a 800x480 7" screen (4x the size and 2.5x the resolution compared to the iphone). Though surely a 8.9" 1024x600 resolution screen would be nicer and would fit in the same form factor and maybe only add $20 to the cost of this device.
Yeah, logically it should be rather easy to put scroll bars, use up/down buttons for quick scrolling, remove touchscreen zoom options, move applications menu to the bottom left corner (like the Windows Start menu), and provide a Google Marketplace which filters apps that are best suited for laptop form factors. Optimaly, the full Chrome browser should launch within Android for Laptop form factors. I expect this is something Google will release soon.
This specific model doesn't have a built-in HDTV output, but my guess is that adding a HDMI output connector might not have to increase cost by more than $5.
I've seen them at Buy.com (2), at Amazon.com, at Kmart.com and plenty other places for even cheaper.
The point of this video is to show that Android and the much faster Android web browser can make all these cheap laptops much more usable when it comes to browsing the web. The Android browser is 100x better than the one in Windows CE or the previous Mozilla-based one they would integrate in those $100 Laptops. More usable means more people will want to buy it, which means even cheaper prices.
Archos 5 Internet Tablet with Android (8GB) $249 Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet (250GB) (the one for using the new Dev firmware) $199 Nokia N900 $649 - Has 2x smaller screen than Archos, much less storage, no HD 720p video decoding, no video recording
The Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet for one has a 3-4 times faster ARM Cortex A8 processor, basically like the processor in the Nokia N900 which costs 700 dollars and has a tiny screen. Archos has always been able to playback all the video codecs at least up to DVD resolution. The Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet now ships with 250GB hard drive for $199 or the 7" version for $209, that's basically the price of a 8GB ipod touch. Archos records TV using DVR connectors for input and output of composite, s-video, component and even with a HDMI output in 720p. Archos has USB 2.0 host for keyboards, mice and external hard drives.
The fact that Intel does not WANT to lower prices does not mean that they COULD NOT do it. If it weren't for Intel and Microsoft's monopoly on the PC/Laptop market, we would have had $50 Laptops that run 20 hours on a battery by now, with instant on and free wireless broadband worldwide.
ARM Cortex A8 at 600Mhz performs better than Intel Atom at 800Mhz for loading Javascripts on HTML websites. Intel Atom 800mhz consumes more than 1W ARM Cortex A8 600mhz consumes less than 350mW
Most other components of a computer follow Moores law as well, some other components evolve even faster than Moores law like certain storage technologies.
If you can double the amount of transistors per chip every 18 months, then you can also halve the size of the same amount of transistors. Thus you CAN halve the price every 18 months. The reason Intel isn't halving the price of their processors every 18 months is not because they cannot, it's because they don't want to. Doing whatever it takes to keep the prices high is the speciality of Intel. Old slower processors are being DISONTINUED by Intel before they are able to be manufactured for cheaper. Just look at the average cost of processors sold by Intel. They kept the average sold processor costs steady between 2000 and 2007, and since the netbooks of 2007, the average price per processor sold by Intel has nearly halved.
The hardware may have problems, but you can't expect it to work better, given AMD did not support the project well enough to keep Geode up to date with the latest cost efficient components. And given OLPC only could afford the amount of engineers working full time that they could afford.
I absolutely don't see where Nicholas Negroponte should have been complaining about the Linux core developed by Ivan Kristic and the other engineers.
Although I am NOT an engineer and I do not know the details of what the actual work has been to make XO-1, I think Ivan Kristic is suffering from some type of frustration having done IMMENSE work, being the software genius that he is, but simply not having had the ressources required to realize all the visions perfectly thus far. And somehow feeling perhaps that his brilliant Bitfrost security mechanisms don't work yet as are intended.
That might lead to the choice Ivan Kristic then made to work for a much larger company Apple. Apple definitely has the ressources in those $20 Billion they have in the bank, to give Ivan whatever he needs to make his visions work.
The difference between having 12 engineers working with or for you (if Ivan was or wanted to be the CTO), and potentially 200 at Apple, means all the difference for him if he has to hack at code all by himself at OLPC with insanely tight deadlines that are always pushed back or to work more comfortably at Apple, get much more sleep, be much better paid.
Anyways, I'd much prefer if they'd all just agree that the evil is not within OLPC but that it has always been that the rest of the world does not let the OLPC vision become reality just that easily. And that it will take more punches to the industry to make it work for the Children and not only for the banks and shareholders.
OLPC has NEVER added things to please Microsoft.
Nicholas Negroponte has always argued that OLPC would only work towards Open Firmware supporting Windows on the laptops. Because he ALWAYS talked about Dual-boot support if ANY Windows Support at all!!!
Windows-only machines would never had been supported by OLPC funds.
Some Governments demand Windows support on the machines before they invest millions of dollars into such a project. That is why OLPC has worked on the open source Open Firmware ONLY, NOT ON THE HARDWARE, to support an eventual Windows port dual-bootable from a USB stick or from an SDHC card.
I hate Microsoft just as anyone else on Slashdot. Yet I also really hate when Linux fans act like complete idiots and bash on the worlds single BEST Linux hardware project EVER. Just because their totally open hardware somehow supports a Windows port also which Microsoft invested a lot of engineers for more than a year to have it working.
As much as I hate Microsoft, I would LOVE IT if Bill Gates announced tomorrow that he will finance $1 Billion to ship 5 million XO-1.5 in Africa running Windows (if he insists) but totally Linux dual-boot compatible as well, since THAT IS HOW OLPC MAKES THEM (providing each class with Linux USB sticks to either install a Linux dual-boot or to replace Windows eventually is easy).