[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Some say the Classmate PC is Intel’s answer to (or competition
with) the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) effort. Intel is hawking the
lilliputian laptop in ’emerging markets’ like Nigeria, India, and
Mexico as a solution for worldwide education of primary and
secondary students. It’s to be officially released and shipped en
masse to schools in Africa and South and Central America by the end
of June. Recently my children and I borrowed a Classmate PC loaded
with a custom version of Mandriva Linux. Most of us had fun.“The Classmate comes out of the box wrapped in a sky blue vinyl
cover that extends out to a built-in handle with, interestingly, a
magnetic closure. This is some tiny technology–Classmate is about
the size of a medium textbook and weighs only about 2 1/2 pounds.
Intel says it is a ‘rugged learning device.’ With that in mind, I
turned the Classmate over to my built-in target market, my
eight-year-old daughter…”