Humane PC and its Humane Reader child are open source hardware projects with some seriously low-cost internal components. At volume the PC could retail for as low as $20, and that’s with 2GB of microSD storage, USB / PS/2 plugs, and video out. The PC is primarily designed to output low-res, black and white text to a TV, making it a low cost reader for developing countries, and the Humane Reader project pre-loads the device with thousands of Wikipedia articles (much in the vein of the OpenMoko WikiReader).
I played around with the Atmel chips last year and was regularly astounded at the power/cost ratio.
Compared to the ZX81, these have gargantuan amounts of power.
Cool to see someone trying to take advantage of this and release devices for cheapcheap!
If they could put a version of BASIC on these things, we’d be all set!
-Ken
Id just want them to make a 6502/6510 C64-compatible device 🙂 To take advantage of the insane amounts of software and retro knowhow of that platform..
Most “3rd world countries” While having problems with food, health care, etc… A lot of the poor still have Cell Phones… Why just make a way to put more educational material into the cell phones.
… so we should get the software.
Wikipedia’s okay, but it still has major content gaps, especially if you don’t speak English. Also, there’s no equivalent that is anywhere near Wikipedia’s completeness when it comes to actual textbooks, especially if you’re talking elementary/middle/high school textbooks and not college textbooks.
(Geeze, we’ll be introducing the wiki walk concept to people who might not even have internet infrastructure yet.)