Is the 100$ laptop a fake?

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!)