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$10 laptop to be unveiled

02 February 2009 14:29 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Aynur Veliyeva â€“ APA-Economics. India is planning to unveil its own low cost laptop intended for use by school children and students.
The cheap laptop has been developed as part of a broader national plan to update the technology used by Indian colleges and schools.
Details of the laptop are scant, but it is reported to use wireless to connect and have 2GB of memory onboard.
It will stand as a rival to the other cheap laptops made by the One Laptop project and Intel.
The machine can be charged with a 2 watt power input, has a 2 GB memory which can be enhanced and a configuration that can be upgraded and will be able to project from the monitor for use in local classrooms.
Early reports of the cheap laptop suggested that it would cost only 500 rupees (Â£7). However, this could be a mistranslation, because transcripts of the speech, in which it was unveiled, mentioned it costing $10 (Â£7) but this was later corrected to $100 (Â£70).
Work on the device has been carried out at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.
Even if the finished device costs $100, it will significantly undercut other low cost laptops aimed at the developing world, such as the One Laptop Per Child’s XO machine and the Intel Classmate.
Originally, the XO was intended to cost $100 but the finished version ended up costing about $188 (Â£131).
The development of the cheap laptop is the latest in a series of initiatives to create low cost computing devices for Indians. In late 1999, the Simputer hand-held computer debuted and has been used in a variety of projects, including digitising land records.