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$75 dollar tablet PC

Posted 24 months ago|3 comments|2,253 views
OLPC XO-3 image from cnet
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Written by
RLwoods
Victorville, CA
The ever expanding accomplishments that are made in the world of computers once again astounds me.
When he saw the need for it Nicholas Negroponte sieved the day. He saw the need of kids in an electronic world to be able to use a computer in their schools. He worked at it and came up with what is now the "One Laptop per Child" organization. He managed to aquire the pieces needed and managed to acquire price deals that enabled him to make fully functional laptop computers for as little as $100.
This was a feat that no one thought possible, and yet, he did it. And thousands of kids, who would not have one, now do thanks to him and his organization. This is a truly amazing feat.
That being great enough, OLPC has been paying attention and are trying to bring a new and formidable task to become a reality in the next coming years.
They want to build a tablet pc for less than $100. In fact they are setting the bar as low as to $75 dollars. They want to build an open source tablet pc with touch screen, wifi and a camera with an induction charger.
I don't know of many cameras alone that could less than $100. My first question that I wanted to know did not have an answer. They did not have the specifications for it, but by all common sense, it would have to do the same things the laptop can do, so I can show the spews for that.
CPU 433 MHz
256 ddr3 RAM
1 gig of flash memory
That is not bad for $75

That is amazing to me; this organization has found the need and supplied it. I am also sure that they are fully capable of implementing a new set of hardware for it. Figuring moors law; I would guess that they would be able to increase all specs by at least %75. But even left as is, that is a nice little gadget.

I remember an old pc that I put together in school. It was an old 386 with 64MB of RAM. It cost me about $100 dollars. This was not even a laptop. That was an old tower, 3.5 inch floppy drive, cd rom drive.

The amazing part is that I am not that old, this was only about 8 years ago. This is a staple to how far we have come with technology. Its things like this company that tests what can be done that I really appreciate what already is and where it is going.

for links to other articles I've written.
http://rlwoodsiii.blogspot.com/

for the original article and a video of the proposed device
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-2000...
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COMMENTS
markbyrn
markbyrn
 Moderator
24 months ago: There's already a tablet that's made for around $75 (including the Chinese Sweat shop labor) but Apple is selling it for $599
TheLegendTomWing
TheLegendTomWing
 Administrator
Philadelphia, PA
24 months ago: well said.
Altruist
Altruist
Eugene, OR
24 months ago: Great post!
The OLPC concept was great and I would like to see it come to fruition. The lack of education in third world countries results in millions of unnecessary deaths and a birth rate that makes it impossible for these impoverished nations to extricate themselves from the spiral of violence and need.

The recent OLPC models were neat because they could recharge with a hand crank, they were almost indestructible and the open source software was flexible and great, but they couldn't get the cost down to $100. Last I checked they were selling for $200. They had good luck getting them out there by doing two fers. If you bought one for $400 they would send one to a third world country for a kid there.

The software is almost as great a challenge as the hardware because of the thousands of different languages and the need to teach kids that have no idea how it works or what to do with the machine.

I don't know if the tablet will be as appropriate if it isn't self charging. Maybe if it had solar cells on the back, and had a breakproof cover. Cell phones are becoming widespread so maybe this will also. At least one or two per village would help a lot.

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