Valid points have been made, as it is quite possible to source the individual components (solar panel, battery, LCD etc) at much lower cost but purchasing these components and sitting them on a bench does not make a fit for purpose product. I don’t think it is unreasonable that a product of this type that is designed to be dumped in the back of a Toyota Landcruiser bumped about for hours on end and still work afterward would cost this much.

Also, to compare a product like this to say a Dell laptop on price is ridiculous. Dell laptops are produced in their millions, need I say more?

He wants to know which OS it will use? Does it matter so much? If the system does what it is supposed to do in an acceptable way, who gives a stuff if Redmond or Cupertino get their royalties? Actually, the ARM processor was designed to run, amongst other things, using an operating system known as RISC OS. You can still get this operating system and, as far as stand alone use goes, it does everything that your vaunted Merkan OS’s can in far less bloat. That doesn’t mean that it would be best for this application, but this project shouldn’t be tied to a big conglomerate just because you feel comfortable with it. I’d even include Linux in such a statement.

“Paul” does make one good point though. The price. Although I’ve never seen a Dell supplied with its own solar panel to date, I do know that a certain UK company has a similar system in the works, and that doesn’t cost anything like this much. I’d be interested to hear the cost breakdown of this system.

How many people here think that a palmtop with the same battery/solarcell arrangement would do about the same thing for half the cost (isnt the ARM processor what they have in many palmtops ???)

As to the person thinking that China will rule the world in 10 years, they will collapse long before any such achievement (further that 10 years by far in any case) because of resource shortages and costs (like oil being 10X as expensive as the same relative cost during the expansion period for the US) and their population continuing to expand.

Anyway for $1200, you essentially get a low performing Linux running PC, with a LCD monitor, and solar panel + battery pack + keyboard and mouse.

For ~$400 to $500 you can get a PocketPC with integrated keyboard and no need for a mouse. Hell, if you really wanted to, there are even linux builds for certain pocketpc hardware. And it’s not out of the question to link one up to a monitor with a little work. In fact, the monitor would be the main power draw, if you just used the LCD screen on the pocketpc the power requirements would be no where near 8Watts.

Another charity spends lots of money buying over priced goods to justify their budget for the next year. *Sigh*

I also helped to arrange early field trials of the Solo in Oyo State. We traveled in areas with no phones, a minimal postal service and very little in the way of electric power supplies. We carried two prototypes of the “transportable” computers and their small solar panels. In order to carry them I only remember one small metal suitcase. We also had a satellite phone so that we could email, but the phone was only necessary with the early prototypes, the production models will have the necessary capability inbuilt. I recall a local doctor travelling to meet us so that he could send an email locally, thus saving himself a long journey to the state capital. Imagine if places like his clinic could have a Solo of their own.

Some months after visiting with the Solo I was back in the same area but I only had an ordinary laptop. Local people whose only previous experience of computers was the Solo were disappointed to see the comparative limitations of my laptop. I have traveled various times since in rural Nigeria, using a mixture of my laptop and rare access to cyber cafes… and wishing that I had the greater convenience of the Solo that we enjoyed during the field trials.