Venezuela buys 1 million laptops

Venezuela is buying the portable computers as part of a $3bn (£1.66bn) bilateral trade deal with Portugal that also covers housing and utilities.

Computer clash

Portugal is manufacturing the blue and white laptops under licence from Intel and are broadly based on the chip maker's design of its Classmate computer.

Dubbed Magalhaes (Magellan), the laptops will have on board low-power Intel Atom chips designed for laptops. They will also sport digital cameras and a broadband net connection.

As an operating system, the machines will run a version of Linux developed in Venezuela.

The deal with Venezuela follows an agreement between Intel and Portugal, signed in August for Classmate machines.

Under that deal Portugal agreed to buy 500,000 machines to enable every six-to-10-year-old in the country to get one.

The deal to buy the machines is the largest yet for laptops created for school children.

Intel's big rival in this market is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation, which has developed the XO laptop.

That machine has wi-fi onboard and its battery can be re-charged using a built-in wind-up generator.

The original aim of the OLPC was to make a laptop that cost less then $100. The finished design ended up costing about $188.

The One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc. (OLPC) is an American non-profit organization set up to oversee the creation of a cheap, affordable educational device for use in the developing world. Its current focus is on the development, construction and deployment of the XO-1 laptop to promote children's education in developing nations. OLPC has generated a great deal of interest in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and One to one computing fields of research. One Laptop Per Child is a 501(c)(3) organization registered in Delaware, USA.[1]

OLPC is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat.[2] Each company has donated two million dollars. Whilst 'not for profit' the manufacturers including AMD will receive 5-10% profit from sales of the unit. [3] [4]

Intel was a member of the association for a brief period in 2007. It resigned its membership on 3 January 2008, citing disagreements with the organization's founder, Nicholas Negroponte.[5]