While mainstream netbooks like the Asus Eee PC, MSI Wind, and Dell Inspiron Mini continue to capture the imagination (and cash) of consumers, it’s nice to see that low cost laptops are  also fulfilling one of their original purposes, and getting into the hands of children in developing countries. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this weekend announced that his country would purchase a million laptops from Portugal. The laptops are based on Intel’s Classmate PC design. 

The exact price hasn’t been disclosed, but each laptop costs “several hundred dollars,” which is far less than the cost of a conventional laptop computer.

The government of Portugal will also be manufacturing half a million Classmate PC-based netbooks for schoolchildren in its owwn country.

As Ars Technica points out, Venezuela’s order is not only the largest single purchase of Classmate PCs to date, the entire OLPC project has yet to sell a million laptops. While the OLPC XO Laptop may have gotten the ball rolling on low cost laptops, it hasn’t proved as popular as the Intel-based Classmate which is capable of running Windows XP. It should be interesting to see if OLPC sales pick up now that the XO Laptop can also run Windows by booting from an SD card.

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5 replies on “Venezula orders 1 million Classmate PCs”

  1. Duarte, would you know if they are assembling the Classmates in Portugal or is it a just a clone of the Classmate model built with inferior parts?
    Because based on means squat. I can built a car ‘based’ on a Mercedes..doesnt mean it will look or run like one.
    It also says a lot about my trust in the media when I belive a forum poster more than the news.

    And I think Chavez is giving a bad example. First, he gives the dirt poor which make up most of that country doctors and dentists, then he builds roads to their remote locations and now he wants to educate them? Imagine if every government started doing that? It would be horrible./
    Bringing hope, health and opportunity to those that have been out of sight and out of mind is just wrong. He could have built some new soccer and baseball stadiums instead with that money.

  2. The Classmates aren’t going to be manufactured by the government, but by JP Sá Couto (https://www.jpsacouto.pt/), a privately held company. What the government does is doing is buy or subsidize them.

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