WSJ on Pakistan’s adoption of the Intel Classmate PC, rejection of the OLPC XO
The OLPC’s XO (or “Sugar”) is really getting flattened. They’ve gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. Initially, they weren’t able to meet the $100 target and ended up being close to $200. Then some key countries that Mr. Negroponte was trying to win over – including Pakistan – decided to abandon the XO since it didn’t run Windows. And now, it seems that a very minimal number of these devices are being shipped. In contrast, the Intel Classmate PC has attracted a lot of interest. Pakistan, Libya and others have decided to place orders for hundreds of thousands of these machines. Finally, on the consumer side, the Eee PC has made waves and continues to sell like hot cakes from sites like Newegg and Amazon. Upcoming SKUs will further reduce price.
The Wall Street Journal completely destroys OLPC and the XO in this new article. We’ve previously reported on the lack of progress on the OLPC project as well. We said it before and we’ll say it again, this project has been a waste of many bright and intelligent people.
What we’re really excited about are projects such as the one Bill Gates is promoting; a phone “driven” PC-like experience. Or even some local efforts like, Sirius by FiveRivers Technologies out of Lahore.
bill gates keeps talking about the smartphone being the future. I would agree, but I wonder why they havent yet taken a tv out port and a usb port, (for a keyboard) and put it in there…it can support that..and then..you have a phone that can plug into a tv and host a keyboard. you have gprs/wimax based websites. that would be all you need to get the average pakistani to connect to the net daily…
they have.. but “they” are HTC and the device is the advantage.. and it costs $900. give it a couple of years.
[...] would be at the end of the year. Probably $199! So now that we’re finally at a point where the Classmate PC is being adopted in Pakistan and roughly 2 million PCs are being sold in the country annually, some serious attention should be [...]