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Intel’s Portuguese play with Classmate PC
July 30, 2008
Intel has made its biggest deal yet for its Classmate PC - the low-cost notebook that has competed with One Laptop per Child and nComputing in bringing affordable computing to the classroom.
It is providing 500,000 Classmate PCs to the Portuguese government for its primary school population, with units already arriving in time for the new school year.
Intel is also providing technology support for the “Magellan Initiative” as part of a long-term programme.
Intel said the government liked the Classmate PCs for their ruggedness, software availability and design for that particular age group. It said Portugal had looked at different options but it is not clear whether OLPC or nComputing were in competition with Intel.
Intel works with local manufacturers to make the Classmate PC, it now has 100 vendors in more than 50 countries.
I remain a little confused about how it sees this business. There seems to be a mixture of philanthropy, extending its brand in emerging markets and priming the pump for adoption of its low-power processors in low-cost laptops for the masses.
Arguably, it no longer needs to do this, now that Asus has led a charge of manufacturers into low-cost laptops with its eee PC.
The Classmate PC received an upgrade in April with a sleeker, more rugged design and better battery life for a selling price of around $350. Its new Atom microprocessor should be included in units later this year.
“This is a great example of how the Classmate PC can be used in mature markets,” Lila Ibrahim, vice president of Intel’s emerging market platforms group, told me, citing the growing reach into countries such as the US, Germany and Italy.
“It shows the range of emerging and mature markets we have and the scale and momentum that has happened over the past few months.”
$350 per Classmate Laptop, that is about double the price of the OLPC XO-1.
Posted by: Charbax | July 31st, 2008 at 12:01 am | Report this commentThe efforts of Intel and the other two groups competing to build a low cost laptop are commendable.
However, there is a large component missing from this effort: Internet access.
On my last trip to Southern Africa I made a point of visiting internet cafes whenever I could. Prices are extremely high and speeds are painfully slow. It literally takes several minutes to load the front page of Yahoo and then another few minutes to load your mail. People are generally extremely eager to be online, often sitting in pairs at the terminals: watching and waiting. In rural areas internet access is extremely limited or non existant.
At INFINICOR we decided to look into the situation: with telephone lines too slow and anyway under the control of governments we figured that the way forward would be to strike a big deal with a satellite company and then distribute internet access locally in urban areas. Companies like Africonnect are already doing this but at high cost and we figured it might be possible to undercut them with payment structures aimed at the broad masses rather than the select few.
However, we hit a really hard rock: there are only a very small amount of satellites covering Southern Africa and they basically want you to pay 15-20 times what you pay for satellite internet access over Europe and North America.
Has anyone heard of any plans to launch communication satellites over Southern Africa to provide internet access?
Posted by: Christian Olsen | August 3rd, 2008 at 10:48 am | Report this commentThe computer is not as such supplied
Posted by: E.Bentosgago | October 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 am | Report this commentby Intel.The computer is being assembled in Portugal from all diferent sources.Realy the author of the article is very confused about the all issue.Clearly he did not do his “homework”!
I did say “Intel works with local manufacturers to make the Classmate PC” and I have been writing about this quite a lot if you follow the links.
Posted by: Chris Nuttall | October 3rd, 2008 at 8:59 pm | Report this commentArgos are the first UK retailer to stock the Intel Classmate PC.
Well done to Argos who have taken the positive step of stocking the second generation Intel Classmate PC under the Fizzbook brand. They will stock it in the UK and Ireland although the UK will be internet only to begin with.
http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Search?storeId=10001&catalogId=1500001151&langId=-1&searchTerms=fizzbook
Posted by: Mike | November 4th, 2008 at 11:52 am | Report this comment