Sure, research analysts at Gartner may say the mythical $100 laptop is at least 3 years away. But apparently the folks at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore never got the memo. Because IDG News reports that they’re developing a laptop that will be sold for just $100, (not $10 as earlier reports suggested)
Now let’s be clear, there are a lot of things we don’t know about this laptop. Will it be the size of a ping pong table and weigh 70 pounds? Maybe. But it will be cheap. You know, if it ever graduates from the vaporware stage.
It’s also not clear whether the PC will actually be worth just $10 or if the government will be dumping huge subsidies into the project to make the computer as affordable as possible. While India certainly has an up and coming economy, there are huge portions of the country that have little or no access to the internet. If these cheap computers use some sort of mesh networking feature like the one included in the OLPC XO Laptop, they could go a long way toward bridging the digital divide.