$10 Laptop is Huge Disappointment ($30 and not a laptop)
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Ok, I'm not saying this is what it does. For what we know, it could be completely crap. But, just imagine:
- You have 30 dollar box - so you can put about as much brain-power in it as a router.
- For really poor countries, LCD screens are a waste when you have TV. So, you just throw in a TV-out, which was cheap 20 years ago.
- From my experience in wiring relatively "wild" places, if you have boxes plugged in a power socket, the people will put the actual wire the place themselves. That's if you don't have OLPC's mesh networking.
This stupid-looking white box could do most for developing countries then anything else in the last 10 years. Except of course mobile phones.
It's from 2005, so you'll have to adjust for changes in population.
"The total number of TV sets owned by households in India is around 60 million".
TV ownership is about 3% higher than refrigerator ownership, it's a matter of priorities, information = knowledge = a chance to get ahead in life.
I could have died of happiness back then if I could put my hands on a $30 worth of 2009 hardware in that little plastic box.
The problem is from the picture it's missing the keys. So it's hard to think of someone hacking a way on the thing when there is no way to input new data while waiting for a bus. If we are thinking about a cheep computer then a commodore 64 for 10$ could be easy to build but that's not what they are doing.
I wonder why a $10 laptop can't be, essentially, a wristwatch or a calculator instead of an iPhone or a netbook?
Linux will run on almost anything, a membrane keyboard (even a mobile phone 12-key pad using SMS text style input), and a small amount of memory... could you get enough hardware to run linux and have some kind of UI for ten bucks?
One guy hacked one (different model), and found its CPU was a 6502 (same as Apple 2e). I don't think linux runs on that, as no memory protection. http://spritesmods.com/?art=picframe&page=1
http://picframe.spritesserver.nl/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Getting cheaper all the time - how long til it disrupts PC/windows/intel?
They'll run linux, but I'm not sure how to get networking into them. Wireless might be a bit ambitious (802.11 is clearly out of the question). Maybe with a simple GPIO pin you could control a small AM transmitter/receiver pair, with the intent of transmitting ~300bps. For the money it might make sense to just put a couple external metal contacts on it and run wires to each desk -- which would also solve powering it.