India unveils world’s cheapest laptop !

India unveils world’s cheapest laptop !

Touchscreen computing device costing just £23 to be rolled out first to 110 million schoolchildren

Josh Halliday

Friday 23 July 2010 19.26 BST

Footage from the launch of the device Link to this video

India has developed the world’s cheapest laptop – a touchscreen device which resembles Apple’s wildly popular iPad but will cost just £23.

The prototype was unveiled today by Kapil Sibal, the country’s human resource development minister, who said 110 million Indian schoolchildren would be the first recipients.

Then, from next year, the device – designed to bridge the digital divide and boost India’s economy – will become available to students in higher education.

Sibal said: "The solutions for tomorrow will emerge from India. We have reached a stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35 [£23], including memory, display, everything."

Past low-cost technologies produced by the country include the £1,450 Tata Nano car and a mobile phone costing less than £11. The iPad retails at about £429 in the UK – 18 times the cost of the Indian laptop.

The tablet computer, developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengalooru, will eventually be made available to the public. It will run on an open source Linux operating system with Open Office software and can be powered by solar panel or batteries as well as mains electricity. It will have no hard drive but users will have access to a USB port, 2GB of memory and a video-conferencing facility, internet browsing.

Sudhir Dixit, director of Hewlett-Packard’s Indian research division, welcomed the announcement. He said: "This is a very strong move with good potential. Previous initiatives with these aims have had laptops priced at around $100, so it is a development.

"The interesting thing is that slate devices are expected to come into the market and cut into sales of laptops and netbooks. The predictions are that slate devices will do to netbooks and laptops what netbooks and laptops did to desktop PCs. It gives people mobility.

"Access to IT in the education system is growing very rapidly. Because of the government’s great push forward in IT, every school will have computers and, at some stage, every person will have access to IT."

More than 62m PCs are expected to be sold in India this year and the figure is predicted to top 100m in 2013. The first quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010 saw a 72% growth in netbook sales.

Dixit said: "This year the IT market has begun growing very rapidly after a slump last year."

The device forms part of the Indian government’s commitment to an across-the-country satisfactory standard of education by 2010. According to 2001 census figures, literacy levels in India are at 63%, lagging behind most other developing nations, including China – where the figure is 93%. There are 60 million registered internet users in India, a country with a population of 1.2 billion.

Earlier this year HP Labs India announced a move to bring tens of millions of people online in the country, enabling users of low-end mobile phones to complete simple functions on websites.

The HP innovation could potentially open the customer market for small businesses from the 60 million registered internet users to the 600 million owners of mobile phones

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http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/23/going-for-cheap-indias-35-computer/?blog_id=100&post_id=16730

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, JULY 23. 2010

Going for Cheap: India’s $35 Computer

By Vibhuti Agarwal

From India Real Time:

India’s Tata Motors won praise world-wide for developing the world’s cheapest car, an innovation designed to put millions of Indians behind the wheel. The Indian government Thursday unveiled a computer it hopes will put millions of Indians in front of a screen.

Associated Press

A low-cost computer was launched by India’s human resource ministry in New Delhi, India on Thursday.

This new computer, aimed at students, costs the same as the country’s cheapest cell phones.

“This is real, tangible and we will take it forward,” Kapil Sibal, minister for human resource development, said at a press conference in New Delhi. The touchscreen tablet will cost about $35, or 1,500 rupees, when it hits markets by early 2011.

The device was developed by students and professors at India’s premier technological institutes, using open-source programming, according to the Associated Press. The Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Mumbai, Chennai and Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore researched it in collaboration with the government-operated National Mission on Education.

The National Mission on Education is working to spread connectivity to India’s universities and colleges.

“We have made the breakthrough and are now ready to capture the market,” Mamta Varma, spokeswoman for the human-resource-development ministry, said Friday.

Ms. Varma said the government plans to roll out one million such computers for university students during the first phase, and expand later to primary and secondary schools.

Last month, Uruguay awarded the nonprofit One Laptop per Child a contract to provide 90,000 of its XO laptops for high-school students in the country. The group hopes in the future to price its durable device around $100; right now it sells for more than that.

India’s new device is an improvement over another hardy computer for the masses launched at Tirupathi in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh last year that had been criticized for its cost, among other things.

Ms. Varma said the ministry has also made open invitation to national and global manufacturers to improve upon the prototype unveiled Thursday. “If more innovations will emerge, the cost of the gadget might be further reduced to $20 or $10,” she said.

The yet-to-be-named device, which has the look of an iPad, has the option of charging by a sleek solar panel. It will have features including an Internet browser, a multimedia player, searchable PDF reader, video conferencing ability and wi-fi connectivity. It is supported by a two-watt backup source for places where power supply may be poor. It also comes with a small, 2-gigabyte memory but no hard disk.