European debut for $100 laptop
By Wilson • Nov 19th, 2008 • Category: Mobile Computer NewsThe much awaited $100 laptops will start selling in Europe on 17th November. These laptops will be sold on Amazon’s outlets online by the organization called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) as a part of their give one get one scheme which has already made its debut in the US where it saw a sales of 190,000 machines.
According to this scheme, every time a person buys a laptop, one machine will be donated to a deserving child in a developing nation. The green and white XO laptops will be sold in at least 27 European nations according to a speech delivered in the World of Health IT Conference, Copenhagen by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC.
The XO laptop will be priced at $268 for retail customers will also be available in Russia, Switzerland and Turkey, which is around the same price, or actually a little more, than the Dell Latitude D610. However, the success of this XO scheme was hampered by OLPC’s inability to deliver machines which were ordered on time. This is one of the reasons why an agreement was signed in September 2008 with Amazon.
The idea started with OLPC’s ambition of manufacturing powerful laptops costing less than $100 for school children. When the machine finally made an entry, it was priced at $188 and saw a sale of 600,000 units.
Though there was a lot of interest shown by nations all over the world, the XO was not sold in the numbers as expected by OLPC. 65,000 units have been ordered for recently by Columbia’s Caldas region.
With competition heating up from the Classmate laptop from Intel, we will have to wait and see the impact of this on sale of XO in Europe.
Tags for this article: laptop, amazon
