The First Breed of XO Laptops will be Shiped to Uruguay

The Government of Uruguay has officially ordered the XO Laptops, touted as the "$100" Laptops. This south american country has ordered 0.1 million laptops initially to help it's students. They have plans to buy another 0.2 million to equip every child with a PC in 2009.

What is the thing?



The XO Laptops were devoloped for the childrens aged 6 to 12 keeping the devoloping countries in mind. A durable, waterproof green-white colored machine that is a XO Lappy has a sunlight readable display with no moving parts. It uses a NAND flash memory to store DATA that is being used as HDD. The alternet power solution is depended on solar-charging/foot-pumping/pull-string method. Learn more about the XO in http://laptop.org/en/laptop/

The price aggregator

OLPC (One Laptop per Child) Organization aims to sell the Laptop for $100 or less but over the previous year, it's price constantly increases and presently is $188. The aggregate price can be calculated from the following chart,




Uruguay's order

Initially the XO laptops will be distributed in eight to nine of the country's 19 regions. A further 300,000 machines will provide machines for all of the country's children. "We will also cover the rest of the country later in 2008 and Montevideo in 2009," said Miguel Brechner, president of the organisation. Uruguay's state-run Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay (Latu) which runs a huge scale education and communication project known as Ceibal, ordered the Laptops. They also reviewed the Intel Classmate PC which is a bit costlier but more powerful. In this scheme, all school involved will be connected wirelessly.

Overall. this product is indeed a boon to the OLPC which previously admitted difficulties getting concrete orders."I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a cheque written," Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the organisation, recently told the New York Times. However, he said he was "delighted" with the first deal. "We commend Uruguay for being the first country to take concrete actions to provide laptops to all its children and teachers and look forward to other countries following this example," he said.