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A project that aims to deliver low-priced laptops with string pulleys to the world's poorest children may have a new market—U.S. schools. The nonprofit "One Laptop per Child" project said on Thursday it might sell versions of its kid-friendly laptops in the United States, reversing its previous position of only distributing them to the poorest nations. "We can't ignore the United States. ... We are looking at it very seriously," Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who founded the project, told analysts and reporters. Once known as the $100 laptop, the lime-green-and-white devices are inching up in price. In February, the project estimated said they would sell for $150 each. Negroponte now puts their price tag at $176 apiece. They would go at a higher price to U.S. schools, he said, because more resources are invested in American education than in developing nations, even in the poorest U.S. regions. The laptop features a string pulley to charge its battery, a keyboard that switches between languages, a digital video camera, wireless connectivity and Linux open-source operating software tailored for remote regions. The display switches from color to black and white for viewing in direct sunlight—a feature unavailable in laptops at least 10 times more expensive. It requires just two watts of power compared to the typical laptop's 30 to 40 watts, and does away with hard drives, relying instead on flash memory and four USB ports to add memory devices. A minute of yanking on its pulley generates 10 minutes of electricity. Negroponte said U.S. schools could receive the laptops by the end of the year in response to interest from 19 governors. Stephen O'Grady, a software analyst with RedMonk LLC, said millions of the devices, which are built by Taiwan's Quanta Computer Inc., could be sold in the United States. "There are still lots of underprivileged kids here who don't have access. So there is definitely a market for a very low-priced machine," he said. |
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