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Thread: The $200 laptop/super PDA type thingy?

  1. #1
    Senior Member tking's Avatar
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    The $200 laptop/super PDA type thingy?

    I'm looking for a device that could work for high school students.

    I had a look at cheap laptops, but they all seem to be more than we really need. I've seen some of my kids use a hacked PSP for all sorts of data entry and web surfing duty, and it even plays games nicely. I guess what I'm looking for is a cheap platform that will do wifi, has at least a 7inch colour screen, has good battery life and is fairly robust (highschool kids aren't known for their gentleness with electronics). Any ideas?

    I'm doing a cost comparison between modernizing how schools approach IT (hugely expensive labs with nasty XP running PCs that get full of cruft the minute they are booted and are a pain in the *** to maintain). A mobile solution would drastically reduce the amount of damage I see happening to computer labs on a daily basis - if it's a personal machine, it'll get looked after. The reductions in electrical use and the freeing up of classrooms also would pay off.

    So, if I can find a reasonably priced alternative, perhaps something that runs on firmware rather than windows (like my pocketpc), can play videos, surf the web and has a couple of gigs of onboard memory to save files. Does such a thing exist?

  2. #2
    Mod w/ an attitude Sterling_Aug's Avatar
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    Sounds like you want the $100 laptop:

    http://news.com.com/The+100+laptop+m...3-5884683.html

  3. #3
    Senior Member tking's Avatar
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    Yeah, I thought about that too, but taking $100 laptops from little, starving, third world kids makes me feel bad. I wonder if MIT is considering an unsubsidized version for chubby first world kids. Looking at the specs, it's pretty ideal - and the hand crank rocks!

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