economy - Quanta will produce USD 100 laptops in Shanghai

The Taiwanese PC producer Quanta has announced it will produce 100 US dollar laptops at a facility in Shanghai, according to the Shanghai Daily. The cheap laptop should make it easier for less wealthy regions to open up to the internet.
The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club organized last year a meeting on this issue and the World Bank has put the issue also high on its agenda.
Quanta expects to sell between five and fifteen million computers in China, India, Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and Nigeria. Mass production is expected to start in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The computer is installed with a chip from Advanced Micro Devices Inc, an MIT-designed LCD screen, a Linux operating system from Red Hat and a hand-shaking electricity generator to replace expensive laptop batteries.
Users will be able to log onto the Internet, play simple games and word processing, MIT said previously.
Intel, however, said the machine can't be called a computer because it is only a "funny gadget."