Sunny Wu’s Blogging Zone

OLPC is a great initiatives for producing US$100 laptops for the education of the children in third world countries. Lately, there are words about it to be made available for consumer market at US$350 or US$525. Considering the mass (as in producing in millions) manufacturing cost is reportedly at US$175. Maybe the 100%+ markup sounds a bit expensive. Anyway, if they can keep the price really at US$350, I think it can potentially fill a consumer market segment and make an impact in the rest of the word.

Why?

Cost

Let’s dive into the bottom line. For people, like my parents who just do web browsing and typing a few Word documents, If they are looking for a simple, light-weight portable computing access, how much will it cost?

For a Palm Folio, a lightweight smartphone companion running a customized Linux at ~<1kg, is priced at US$499.

For a Dell M1210, a full Windows-powered laptop at ~2kg, starts at ~US$1000.

OLPC, at ~1.5kg light, clearly has a price advantage in the portable computing market segment where you pay much more $$$ for a lot less weight.

Desktop-like Web Browsing Experience

From the OLPC wiki, OLPC is running a browser that shares the same core of Firefox and is capable of running Adobe Flash and Java. These are all key web browsing enabling technologies and with the rising popularity of web applications, consumers will not miss a bit by running OLPC.

What’s in it for me?

It looks like a perfect laptop for casual web browsing on sofa, most importantly, bed during a chilling winter night (oh, and bathroom too).

Of course the fact that it is a great initiative, basing on open source software and a lot of attractive features that I haven’t mentioned here, certainly create interest.

Personally, I would hope that the price could be a bit cheaper like US$200-250 and then it can make a negative impact to my wallet and, of course, a positive impact to the consumer world.