Intel and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) today announced they have agreed to work together to bring the benefits of technology to the developing world through synergy of their respective programs. Under the agreement, Intel and OLPC will explore collaborations involving technology and educational content. Intel will also join the board of OLPC.

OLPC is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to bring learning opportunities to the most remote and poorest children of the world by providing connected, low-cost and rugged laptops to each and every child in their daily lives.

Thanks to several factors, including a lower value of the dollar, Microsoft throwing in their $3-per-copy operating system, and production delays, the $100 OLPC project will now cost nearly double that figure per laptop. The asking price is now $175 per laptop. We are seeing production delays because the OLPC project needs $3 million USD to begin production of their laptop. While they have offered their laptop to several countries, few have actually followed through with the project. The founder of the OLPC project hopes that orders from Peru and Russia will allow them to start production by October 2007.

The One Laptop Per Child project set itself the target of delivering not only a laptops to children in poor countries. The non-profit organization wants to provide a window to the world and a sees its XO computer as the right tool for exploring and learning.
ZDNet now has a story online that covers the introduction of the XO laptop in a small Nigerian village. Before that happened the only computer the small school had was a PC painted onto a wall. The teacher didn't have a computer, neither did he have access to one in his life before. You might imagine how eager the kids were to hold their first personal computer in their own hands. I really hope that this project will be successful and the governments who already promised to buy several thousand XOs will keep their word.

If you are keen on how the user interface of the aforementioned XO looks like then head directly to Engadget.com who have plenty of screenshots of it.

Most of you have probably heard of the One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC for short, project. The project aims to provide a large quantity of low price laptops for low-tech countries. Intel decided that they want a peace of the action, and hence made the Classmate PC. Their cheap family-oriented laptop uses a 900MHz Celeron M, is based off of an Intel chipset, has 256MB of RAM, and 2GB of NAND flash storage. The operating system can be either a copy of Linux, or Windows XP. This hardware is noticeably better than the OLPC laptop, which features an AMD Geode processor, however at a significant price increase. The Classmate PC can cost up to $500 USD, which would make some retail solutions a bit cheaper (and even more powerful). Regardless, Intel has a customer for this laptop...Chile.

It was reported a few days back on techPowerUp! that the One Laptop Per Child project intended to release its $100 laptop to the public, but apparently the organisation has now claimed otherwise. An announcement from the project said "contrary to recent reports, One Laptop per Child is not planning a consumer version of its current XO laptop, designed for the poorest and most remote children in the world." The non-profit organisation is considering commercial ventures beyond 2008, but for the meantime they will only be available to the governments of developing countries. It's not yet totally clear why OLPC is against selling the laptops to the public if it could raise money to benefit the poorer countries, part of the reason could be that it wants every laptop it produces to benefit poorer countries.

Most techPowerUp! readers will already know about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, but if you are unaware what it does it is a project aiming to build basic laptops which can be produced for $100 in order to encourage IT development in poorer countries. The machine is set to go on sale next week and when it was first announced many people were interested to know whether the laptop would be available to richer countries, and the answer is yes. But is does have a catch: you need to buy two. This isn't the manufacturer trying to be greedy though - you will only get one laptop but you are essentially paying for one of the machines to be sent to the developing world. The main aim of the project is still to help poorer countries, but this should allow it to provide a few extra laptops. To learn more about the project visit this site.