Designed to compete with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project's low-cost laptop for education, Intel's Classmate PC is about to be put to the test in Brazil. With a faster processor, more built-in storage, more memory, and a higher price tag than OLPC's product, the Classmate PC is capable of running either Windows or Linux.
Intel plans to provide the government of Brazil with between 700 and 800 units to distribute for testing purposes. This new test follows Intel's successful pilot program in which the laptops were tested by students at a school in a community near Sao Paulo. Last month, the OLPC project delivered about 60 units to the Brazilian government, with 1,000 more scheduled for delivery next month. There is also some speculation that the OLPC project may contract companies from Brazil to manufacture the servers that will be used to operate the OLPC mesh network.
Brazil will be testing both laptops in order to determine if the Classmate PC is worth the higher price. Right now, the Classmate PC costs approximately $400 per unit, but Intel anticipates that the price will go down as the number of orders increases. There are also shipping costs to consider since the OLPC is manufactured in China, whereas Intel would have the Classmate PC manufactured at facilities in Brazil.
Regardless of which product is selected, it is likely that the government of Brazil will choose to use the open-source Linux operating system. In 2003, Brazil's president began promoting Linux adoption within the government, saying that proprietary software licensing costs were rapidly becoming economically unsustainable. Since then, Brazil's public sector has invested considerable resources in Linux training for civil servants.
The hardware selected by Brazil could potentially influence choices made by other countries. Some critics of the OLPC (including those at Intel) claim that the hardware limitations of the device decrease its value as a teaching tool. Despite the hardware limitations, developers have managed to get the OLPC system to run a variety of useful applications, including software for web browsing and word processing. In the grand tradition of Linux hardware geekdom, developers have also ported Doom.