"The $100 laptop is coming together, its founder says, but without the famous crank.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop Per Child, said in a keynote at LinuxWorld here that OLPC is preparing to deliver its first 5 million to 10 million machines late this year or early in 2007. The machines will come with 7-inch screens and a 500MHz processor from Advanced Micro Devices, will use flash memory in lieu of a hard drive, and will run a Linux operating system. The hand crank, which was criticized by Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, will be moved to the machine's power supply brick, however.

Despite the groundswell of interest and some criticism it has created, the $100 laptop, Negroponte said, is primarily an educational tool designed to be owned and maintained by schoolchildren. Its job, in part, is to educate by granting students access to the Internet and its vast store of information-Negroponte joked that many students' first word in English is "Google"-as well as by allowing them to write computer programs. But it is likely to teach the computer industry, famous for its grandiose projects that inevitably face setbacks, something of a lesson as well: Think small."

Related Products

Read on at eWEEK