Holy! India Brings Out the $10 Laptop
Just saw this bit of news on Rediff that India has unveiled its much talked and blogged about $10 Laptop, and apparently the ministry of HRD has kept its promise with this price. After Ratan Tata laid claim to the cheapest car ever with the Nano last year India has its hands on the cheapest laptop if this story remains confirmed.
India first announced the plan to make these ultra cheap laptops in the summer of 2007 almost two years back, and had said it would take around 2 to 3 years before it can come out with the product. With this launch we have even stuck with the time lines surprisingly. The laptop is expected to hit the market in 6 months time.
The $10 laptop has always seemed a very unlikely aspiration on part of the Indian government and was only seen as an ego battle against Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop part of the OLPC programme which India had refused to be part of. The announcement was met with a lot of skepticism in the blogosphere and there were contradicting reports that the the government actually meant $100 instead. However, laying aside all the rumours the project has finally been unveiled and the price is expected to be anywhere between Rs.500 to 1,000.
“The mission was launched at a huge gathering of academicians and the officials from across the country including thirty vice chancellors of central and state universities at the campus of Sri Venkateshwara University Tirupati.” This is a rediff quote, the only thing that sounds amiss here is that if it was such a huge gathering why aren’t there any other report on this matter yet? Anyway that is just a curiosity more than an acquistion.
S K Sinha, joint secretary in the ministry for education, gave a demo to this packed audience though as of now we have no report on how the product looks or any concrete specs of the laptop. The laptop has 2 GB onboard memory with wireless Internet connectivity.
It seems a little too good to be true even now, and I am waiting eagerly to know what this thing looks like. If it holds on to its quality like the Nano did then it will most certainly be a proud moment for a nation whose contribution to computing began with a simple Zero. Fingers Crossed.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS Feed OR Email Alerts!
Difficult to believe!
Yes, it is too good to be true. It is just a storage device which the govt likes to call a ‘laptop’. I read about it on Pluggd.in, here:
http://www.pluggd.in/technology/10-laptop-500-rs-from-india-3672/
(Title: $10 laptop from India – is a storage device)