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‘Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone’
January 30, 2006 | 11:46 am
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By David Rothman
Bill Gates is talking about using not laptops but cell phones with TV and keyboard connections to get Third World kids online.
Me, I’d much prefer MIT’s $100 laptop approach since it’ll lend itself better to e-books. Typical TV screens now lack the resolution that the MIT approach will offer. Hey, I appreciate billg’s broaching the topic of a cellphone-TV duo. But from a literacy perspective, the MIT plan is much better. Besides, what about places in the Third World that are beyond locals TV signals, and where the poor can’t afford satellite dishes?
(Via the New York Times.)
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Comments:
For all my skepticism, the MIT project does show some serious thought put into the problem. Bill’s idea requires serious infrastructure that does not exist in the third-world countries targeted by these efforts: reliable electricity and available networking either wired or wireless.
You are right on the poor resolution of television sets, and assuming the availability of one in the first place again betrays a serious lack of understanding. Cell phone displays, much like PDAs, and fine for looking up reference information that you will look at for a few seconds to a minute, but just don’t scale to use beyond that.
I have no beef against Windows CE and have used it extensively.; but it’s a bad fit. This project will require the ability to go deep into the OS, to optimize for the limited hardware resources, and the lack of license fees and dedicated development tools could unleash a wave of Free or Open Source software once the device actually ships.
There is more to the computing age than the internet. While I’m not denying the internet’s integral part, a phone can not provide the computing power necessary for economic development. In the end, the purpose of technological equality is economic equality.
I happen to know the student currently working on the $100 laptop project at the M.I.T. Media Lab and he is using a scaled down version of Ubuntu for the operating system. If you have never heard of Ubuntu, its a great new release of the Linux kernel combined with a number of open source programs (www.ubuntu.com).
Ubuntu Linux – 100$ laptop:
Are you sure about this, Todd? I thought Red Hat is one of the projects main sponsors and would therefore provide the OS.
Do you know which browser will come with the system?
PS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24100_laptop mentions a Red Hat variant (as of Nov. 2005).
How about laptops as phones, instead of cellphones as computers? The $100 laptop with mesh networking would allow kids in underdeveloped countries to use Skype or any of the, voice enabled, messaging software. Negroponte is now talking about servers that would stay on all the time that could help with the up-time of the mesh network.
http://news.com.com/Negroponte+Slimmer+Linux+needed+for+100+laptop/2100-7346_3-6057456.html?tag=sas.email