This column first appeared in Business & Finance magazine in October 2007.

Richard Delevan
This December the hippest gadget gift under Western Christmas trees may be a bright green laptop costing less than $200 but built for Third World children. A digerati version of the Make Poverty History wristband or a yellow “bracelet” sported by Lance Armstrong - a combination status symbol and conspicuous social conscience - according to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, an early backer of the project. Will that make you more or less likely to buy one?
The $100 laptop concept was conceived by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - a vision to put ultra-low-cost computing into the hands of the world’s poorest children as a way of radically improving their education and chances for economic success in later life.
Negroponte got the idea after observing the effects that the introduction of computers he’d helped donate had on children in a poor community in Cambodia. At the January 2005 World Economic Forum, Negroponte announced his intention to get a laptop produced at that unit cost and to ship it to the world’s poorest children.
The result was an industry-wide reaction to Negroponte’s call to arms. Just how far down could you drive the price of a laptop? And not just a laptop but one that would be designed for children, connect easily to the internet and other laptops, be rugged against the elements and usable in environments without adequate electricity supplies, and use free and open source software? Backers, each donating $2m to fund the project, included chip maker AMD, Google, ebay, Nortel, and others. Intel started its own effort, but wound up backing Negroponte.
The result is a machine called an XO. With a 7-inch screen and a bright green casing, the XO looks very much like a child’s toy. But the laptop has some extraordinary advances that are likely to influence the way other computers are designed in future.
It has no moving parts - using a 1GB flash memory rather than a hard drive. Its stripped-down Linux operating system is very efficient in using the 256mb of DRAM. The XO has a video camera built in. It can connect to WiFi networks using the 802.11 standards. It’s sealed against spills as well as moisture and dust. Its high-resolution screen (which can be seen easily in direct sunlight) and processor only need a fraction of the power of ordinary laptops, making it far more energy efficient to run. Its flash memory uses less power than a hard drive would have. Its battery stays charged for far longer, and can be recharged with a foot-wide solar panel, foot pedal or pull cord - handy in places where electricity is scarce or unreliable.
The XO, and the whole idea behind it, is not without its critics. Some in the development community rail against the absurdity of providing laptops to hungry children in villages where they don’t have basic sanitation or reliable access to clean water. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pointedly kept the focus of his philanthropic efforts to combatting disease. They also ask, what will happen when they break or don’t have internet connections, hardly a rare occurrence in the Third World?
Environmentalists insist it will add toxic, hard-to-dispose of rubbish to piles in countries ill-equipped to recycle it. And others charge that the project has already failed to get to its goal - the $100 notional figure couldn’t be reached, the XO costs $189. Finally, Negroponte all along had said it wouldn’t be sold in the West but would be sold in bulk orders to Third World governments.
The criticism is misplaced. With the possible exception that the last thing the world needs is another cause-related piece of symbolic plastic the worthy Western middle class is expected to display.
But the laptop is less like those concerts headlined by Bono and Bob Geldof and more like their behind the scenes work influencing trade policy to level the playing pitch for Third World farmers: it’s something that may actually make a difference. The very exposure to the basic tools of the information age at least gives those children an opportunity to escape the poverty trap by acquiring skills and access to the global economy in this life, not in some distant future.
When they break, the XO is designed for easy repair by the kids themselves. (See a video of an 8 year old replacing the motherboard http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=1003). And when no wireless internet connection is present, the laptops automatically see each other - allowing for collaboration on shared lessons.
Far from being environmentally harmful, the XO laptop has so many energy-saving innovations that it is likely to influence the design of PCs and laptops generally. The very constraints of the project forced designers to innovate across a whole range of features, in fact.
Which leaves this somewhat questionable prospect of something that’s been built as a serious tool for poor children becoming a toy for rich children. On November 12, the XO will be available for sale for just two weeks in the US and Canada, sold in pairs for $400. That money buys both laptops. One is shipped to you. The other laptop is donated.
The naysayers will continue carping on about it, but I think the XO is a breathtakingly smart bit of technology - more importantly, smart philanthropy. If the price is a few wristband-wearers swanning around with these little frog-like gadgets, it’s well worth it.
The only catch is that there are as yet no announced plans to sell in Europe. But expect that to change soon. Maybe even before Christmas.

Richard Delevan is the business editor of the Sunday Tribune. rdelevan@tribune.ie