One-laptop-per-child by next year?

A hand-cranked laptop that will cost roughly $100 is expected to be in the hands of schoolchildren in poorer countries by late 2006.

MIT Media Lab chairman Nicholas Negroponte said at a UN internet summit in Tunis, Tunisia, that his not-for-profit organisation was negotiating with manufacturers and would have an initial order placed by February or March. Brazil and Thailand are among the six governments that have showed the strongest interest, Negroponte said.

The final design incorporates a low-power display designed by project engineer Mary Lou Jepsen that's designed to run for up to 40 minutes in black-and-white mode with one minute of cranking.

The case colour is a combination of lime green and yellow. Negroponte, who runs the One Laptop Per Child not-for-profit group that's organising the effort, said: "It was the hardest decision. We wanted to use colour because it's a message of playfulness."

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who showed up at the beginning of the event, said: "This is truly a moving experience. It's also a moving expression of global solidarity and corporate citizenship."

In principle, the project seems simple: design a laptop with built-in wireless and minimal power consumption, find manufacturers willing to build it for about $100, convince governments to buy it in quantities of at least one million as an initial order, and give it to schoolchildren to keep as their own property. (The goal is tens of millions produced and distributed within two years.)

But negotiating with governments has proved to be strenuous - Negroponte called it "very hard" - and the price quotes to build the machine remain closer to $110 than $100. He said: "We're not even going to promise they're $100. They may be $115. What we're promising is that the price will float down."

Another worry is what happens to the laptops after they're handed gratis to students with families that are struggling to survive. The average Nigerian, for instance, makes $1,000 per year - so a family would have a strong incentive to sell the laptop because they need the money.

Negroponte said: "One of the things you want to do is make sure there's no secondary market." He said one solution would be to make sure "the machine will be disabled if it doesn't log in to the network for a few days".

The proposed design of the machines calls for a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory and a unique dual-mode display that can be used in full-colour mode, or in a black-and-white sunlight-readable mode. It's not clear yet how much cranking will be needed for the higher-power colour mode.

It's expected to run an open-source operating system, probably Linux, Negroponte said, rather than a closed-source product from Apple or Microsoft. Companies including AMD, Google, News Corp and Red Hat have donated to the project.

Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com