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A luxury no longer, Chris Long, looks at the drive towards low cost laptops.
The One Laptop Per Child project was the catalyst for a revolution
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In the old days, you would buy a desktop computer to do your work on and if you had a lot of money, maybe a laptop too to take travelling with, pure luxury.
Today the desktop market is declining and everyone is buying notebooks.
And while juggernauts like the traditional notebook cost a similar amount to an equivalent desktop, you would pay a hefty premium for anything smaller.
Well now it is think small, think cheap, think very cheap.
Until recently laptops have been marketed as high value almost designer items, where stylish people use them in interesting places, maybe with an expensive coffee.
At the other end of the spectrum the mobile market has shown that there is a desire for very portable data capture or web surfing devices.
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We didn't anticipate such a big response from the market, from the customers
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It has been a while coming though, but now the technology planets have aligned we have found ourselves in a cheap computer revolution where we have small notebooks selling for as little as ?100.
Perhaps the biggest winner in this area has been Asus's Eee PC which stumbled into a massive success with its extraordinarily cheap ?250 notebook.
$100 laptop
Emily Lee of Asus, explained: "We didn't anticipate such a big response from the market, from the customers.
"It really hit a gap."
The catalyst for this revolution has been the One Laptop Per Child project or OLPC. It has been dubbed the $100 laptop, despite costing nearly twice that.
Gaynor Dewit of VIA Technologies told Click: "The OLPC had several effects, in terms of pricepoint, it slashed the market open for that type of device.
"It also had people talking about the emerging markets but actually in reality in the western world, what it talked about was cheaper PCs.
"The whole concept, whilst $100 was not feasible, certainly blew the market open and started people talking about this and really it was one of the catalysts for the whole Eee PC platform style thing to take off."
Laptops used to only be at the high-end of the market
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Although others suggest it is not quite such a direct line between the easy PC and the OLPC
Rupert Goodwins, editor of ZDNet said: "It was a very, very bold statement which unfortunately hasn't come to pass as predicted but it did make a lot of people go back and look at the education market and they thought 'well, perhaps there is something here, we can't hit $100 but we'll try and we'll make it say $300 or $200', and all the arguments for there being computers in classrooms are true even in countries that are relatively well off.
Cheap boast
"So that was where the Asus came for the education market that wasn't being addressed properly, the OLPC demonstrated that.
"The Asus Eee came from a different engineering idea, marketwise it was very similar."
Another early player in the low cost market was Intel with its Classmate PC also aimed at developing communities, and this is one of the few times you will see a big company executive boasting about how cheap their product is.
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The keyboard is liquid-proof, you can spill the milk on it.
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John E Davies of Intel, explained: "We have a smaller screen, we run less memory, we get the costs out of the system any way we can.
"It also needs to be rugged, kids will drop these on the floor, they will break and so it is all solid state parts, it's flash, there's no hard disc there.
"The keyboard is liquid-proof, you can spill the milk on it, it will survive that, it will survive the backpack test."
New market
There are lots more devices on the way - from many other manufactures as they jump on the low cost bandwagon. Perhaps most notably the Elonex One which is being sold in the UK for ?99.
True it is a low powered device with a seven inch (17.5cm) detachable screen that runs Linux, but it is easily powerful enough surf the net while sipping an expensive coffee.
Asus are talking about selling 5 million Eee PCs by the end of the year, which is enough to kick start a market.
Ultimately then, it would seem for these low costs devices to be a real success they have to be produced for everyone, not simply developed as hybrid devices to bring computers to the third world.
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