It's good to see recently Khaled Hassounah, director of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme in Africa and the Middle East, unveiling the laptops in a local school in Abuja, Nigeria.
About a month ago, when the war of words between the OLPC's Nicholas Negroponte and chip making giants Intel first blew up, my first question then was, who will benefit from this impasse?
The enthusism that greeted the launch of the $100 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, a scheme aimed at building low-cost computers for education in developing countries, at the World Summit for Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis in 2005, has now been eroded by the reality of the spiralling cost of the project.
While the OLPC's machine, the XO-1, is currently priced at $175 (£88), the Classmate is priced at $285 (£143). However, Negroponte says this can be reduced to around $100 as more are manufactured and Intel hope theirs could eventually go below $200.
The OLPC has a cutting-edge long-distance wireless networking capabilities and runs the open source Linux operating system, Intel's Classmate has a faster processor and can run Linux or Windows XP Embedded, a stripped-down version of the Microsoft operating system.
Watch the video below to see how a Brazilian website compared the OLPC with the Classmate (in spanish).
While the fights goes on, a lot of early adopters who have signed on with the OLPC, such as Brazil, Nigeria and Pakistan, starts questioning the project.
Intel chairman, Craig Barrett, told reporters in 2005: "Mr Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop - I think a more realistic title should be the $100 gadget," to which Negroponte responded: "The concept has received a lot of criticism and yet after that criticism they are either copying it or doing things perfectly in line with the concept."
Luis Ramirez wrote a well thought out comparison between the OLPC and classmate and why the technical specifications leans favorably towards the classmate, the obvious selling point will be in the ruggedness and cost. In this case, i think the OLPC just shaves it.
As far as African governments are concerned, all the technical jargons are all well and good, but anything above $100 really is of no benefit to the poor African child.
