Thailand Bails on OLPC (now known simply as "XO")

Well, apparently the new military-led government in Thailand has a thing about cheap computers. Or, at least it would seem that way. The Thai government, according to sources there, has backed out of a deal to buy a million of the OLPC Project's lappies. The information minister has derided the project as a "toy," and they've called off the whole deal.

This as the first 50 real, live units ship out to Brazil for testing in the wild. Way to kill the buzz, Thailand! Sheesh!

And lest we go two months without another alphabet-soup moniker to throw around, Negroponte's gang has rechristened their machine the XO. It's all, like, totally huggy-kissy and all, but like, c'mon, dudes ... we were just getting used to calling it "2B1," and now you go and change and we have to get all new keywords and labels and search engine tags and whatnot.

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Classmate PC Gets (Almost) Real

Those of you scoring at home can add a tally mark to the until-now-empty Intel column on the scorecard of low-cost, third-world-loving computers. The Classmate PC, which can be had for the price of three units from that other organization, has finally got some specs.

Firstly, lest we think the developing world will be completely Micro$uck-free in the oh-so-connected future, the Classmate will be sporting everybody's FAVE OS, Windows XP. (There's a third of the $400 price tag, right there!)

To power that resource-loving XP, the Classmate will carry a whopping 256MB DDR2 RAM (can you even boot XP past a Blue Screen Of Death with that?), a single lonely GB of NAND flash storage, a 7" display at 800x400, and a 6-cell lithium-ion battery (Sony? Wait, do we smell smoke??). Oddly, the Classmate d33t5 FROM INTEL fail to mention a processor. What up with that?

Anyway, you can get your Classmate on in the Spring of 2007, allegedly. For those developing nations who will eschew the open-source OLPC, the Classmate will be the, uh, not exactly "Cadillac," but probably a (small) step up from the hand-crank love. Cool, huh?

Photo credit: Ricardo's Blog, at (oddly enough) www.ricardosblog.com.

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