Feb 4 2009 Update: Found at Technology Review: “It turns out that India’s ‘$20 laptop’ — a gadget meant to cheaply deliver online educational content to students at more than 18,000 Indian colleges — may actually be more of a handheld web access device than a laptop computer.” And, it doesn’t look like a laptop at all. What is it, really?

____

This is just a quick note on an item spotted at PhysOrg.com:

(PhysOrg.com) — On February 3, the Indian government will display a prototype of the Rs 500, a $10 laptop that will hopefully give more young people the opportunity to learn and help increase the country’s school enrollment.

[...]

The $10 laptop will be equipped with 2 GB of memory, WiFi, fixed Ethernet, expandable memory, and consume just 2 watts of power.

Pre-mass production, the cost of the laptop is down to $20 per unit, which is dramatically lower than the $47/unit manufacturing cost noted by Education Futures in 2007. We will follow this closely over the next few months as production and distribution of the devices take off.