Potential computer users in the developing world will not want a basic $100 hand-cranked laptop due to be rolled out to millions, according to Craig Barrett, ECO of Intel.
Schoolchildren in Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria will begin receiving the first few million textbook style computers from the MIT Media Lab run by Nicholas Negroponte from early 2006.
"Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop -- I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," Barrett, chairman of the world's largest chipmaker, told a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful."
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has welcomed the development of the small, hand-cranked, lime-green devices, which can set up their own wireless networks and are intended to bring computer access to areas that lack reliable electricity.
Negroponte said at their launch in November the new machines would be sold to governments for schoolchildren at $100 a device but the general public would have to pay around $200 -- still much cheaper than the machines using Intel's chips.
But Barrett said similar schemes in the past elsewhere in the world had failed and users would not be satisfied with the new machine's limited range of programs.
"It turns out what people are looking for is something is something that has the full functionality of a PC," he said. "Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown up PC ... not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power."
Barrett said Intel was committed to delivering IT access to the developing world -- and is helping Sri Lanka Telecom set up south Asia's first long-range WIMAX wireless network -- but would not produce a cut-price product like MIT's computer.
"We work in the area of low cost, affordable PCs, but full-function PCs," he said. "Not handheld devices and not gadgets."
He said Intel was also expanding an IT teacher training plan it says has already reached 3 million schoolteachers worldwide to Sri Lanka, and praised local projects aimed at producing computer literacy. Some 90 percent of Sri Lankans were literate but only 10 percent computer literate, he said.
