Nigeria buys into $100 laptops

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The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative for the developing world is gaining ground in Africa, with Nigeria announcing the acquisition of one million laptops. I’m not to sure how smart of an idea these things are, but lately the price is rumored to be nearing $150 a piece for these $100 laptops.

Nigeria Communication Commission Executive Vice Chairman Ernest Ndukwe said Nigeria has already committed to ordering one million machines. Egypt has said it is almost ready to commit itself to buying the laptops but has not said how many it is prepared to order. Zambian officials say negotiations to buy the machines are progressing well and that the country may soon announce the number of machines the country intends to order. The laptops will have a 500MHz processor and 128M bytes of DRAM, with 500M bytes of flash memory. The laptops will also have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network with each laptop being able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc local area network.

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