Review: Low-Cost Laptops for Third-World

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This winter I handed one Intel Corp.'s Classmate PC to my 14-year-old son, a high school freshman who has been pestering us for a computer to use at school.

"It's cute," he said. "Kind of dinky. I'll do my work on this, but can I also play some games?"

Meanwhile, my sister and her husband in Seattle bought their kids an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, telling their 10-year-old daughter Rebecca to "have fun, figure out how this works, and teach the rest of us."

Rebecca was thrilled, but then she usually is when you hand her anything challenging.

Within a few weeks, however, both computers were barely being used, benched, as it were, by lackluster performance and frustrating bugs. The problems were bad enough to turn off our kids.

Admittedly, it might be a different story if our children like those in developing countries were not already familiar with high-end laptops, ubiquitous Wi-Fi and YouTube. Still, it's hard to imagine how the problems we encountered would not eventually pose an obstacle regardless of locale or expectations.

The Classmate PC and the OLPC are, at this point, the leading players in the emerging market of rugged, low-cost laptops designed to bring a new educational opportunity to children without access to technology. Analysts at Gartner say more than 6 million of the ultra low-cost PCs will ship by 2012, although there are fewer than 100,000 circulating so far.

Neither the Classmate PC nor the OLPC are currently for sale in the U.S. For six months Intel and the OLPC Foundation were actually partners, but in early January Intel quit the OLPC board, citing disagreements.

And although there are some similarities both are about half the size of a 17-inch laptop, and both aim to improve poor children's lives there are some fundamental differences: The OLPC is a tutor unto itself, designed to educate a child who may not have access to a classroom or a teacher; the Classmate PC, on the other hand, comes with educational software and systems to be used in classrooms as a learning assistant.

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