UN introduces 100 dollar laptop for the poor

The UN is planning on introducing a cheap and robust laptop for pupils in poorer nations which will cost very little and last much longer. It will use flash memory instead of a hard drive which should help extend its life a lot.

“The laptops are powered with a wind-up crank, have very low power consumption and will let children interact with each other while learning.”

Big names, including Google are behind the project and it will use open-source software. Though the article doesn’t mention it, I am pretty sure it will come with Linux as the operating system.

It’s about time that something like this has happened. Though open source has spread to a number of places, both rich and poor, it hasn’t seen mass acceptance yet and its full potential is yet to be utilized. A laptop like this should provide an opportunity for open source to grow even more.