Is the 100$ laptop a fake? February 8, 2006
I’m home sick (sort of stomachache, probably) today and since I spent the whole morning in bed with no computer at all I had the chance to let my mind run free following interesting paths. I finally arrived at the “Informatics for the emerging countries” problem and, from here, to the recently unveiled 100$ laptop project.
The title is obviously provocative since, for certain usage scenarios, a computer such as the Negroponte’s 100$ laptop could really be useful but I have to side with Bill Gates who recently proposed cellphones as alternative to computers in the emerging countries.
It seems that there’s quite a lof of buzz around the 20$ cellphone and, given the GSM world coverage and the cellphones ever growing market and acceptance by users mobile phones are really preannouncing such a scenario.
As many of you probably know I’m currently working on Mobup, which is basically an open source app for photo moblogging. It gives the user the possibility to publish online (read: to blog) photos and text directly from her java enabled cameraphone (I’m aware that 20$ mobiles won’t probably come with any camera, but the camera usage could be easily disabled) from every place reached by a mobile network. A Mobup equipped cellphone fitts in your jeans pocket, it could be used with just one finger and one button and it’s much more falls proff then the average computer, and yet lets you blog as you were in your very own home sofa wi-fi connected (like me, right now 
.
And if you aren’t going to wait for the 20$ cellphone you can easily find a Nokia 3660 for less then 70�
My opinion is that vertical apps+devices (such as the mobupped cellphone for the mobile blogger) are going to cancel the digital divide, but then I’d need to talk about network infrastructures, but this is another story.
P.S. We’ll talk about Mobup in Sun Milan next 21st February.
Update 3rd April 2006: African mobile phone subscribers hit 100 million mark (yes dude: 100 million!)
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3 Responses to “Is the 100$ laptop a fake?”
I’ve been convinced from others that the $100 computer is just a marketing initiative. By the way Negroponte eventually cares also about the culture on using computers (learning how to use programs, or how to program itself), so something more related to the profession not just flickering. Would you work only with a cellphone? I couldn’t. Maybe in the future you will be able to connect your phone to the TV and so on, but then you will have to provide also the telly to those guys And remember that this is a project thought for third world needs (electricity for instance)
1) Is the 100$ a marketing initiative? I think that only time will show. It’s indeed a (or one of the possible) good move towards the deletion of the digital divide.
2) Is the informatics culture useful to fasten the progress and enrich the economies of the developing countries? Yes, absolutely. Is programming or deep computer knowledge necessary to someone of dares to approach informatics and take advantages from it? NO! Is the access (of any type) to the Internet and to its services one of the first step in the right direction? YES!
And let me add a point to your last sentence: a mobile phone battery (which, as you probably know, could also be recharged using human labour) lasts incredibly more than a laptop one.
A pc without electricity is completly useless just like dry milk without water.