India recently signed an agreement to purchase 250,000 XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Given India’s lukewarm reception to the concept in the past, it’s surprising to see that they are starting to buy into the concept.
Perhaps the success of the pilot program in 2007 has convinced them that this is a good idea. And while an Indian company has attempted to create a $10 alternative, their efforts have had little to no results.
PC World interviewed the CEO of the OLPC India group, who stated that the laptops will go to about 1,500 schools. The bad news is that this isn’t going to help AMD, who had their CPU dropped in favor of the VIA C7-M chipset. The system memory has also been increased to 1 GB, and the internal storage has been bumped up to 4 GB. There are also rumors of a 2.0 model that should be revealed in 2010.
[via Ars Technica]