Photo: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

RUGGED AND LOW-POWER: Internet Service Providers sold AMD's Personal Internet Communicator to their customers; the device's future is unclear.

Advanced Micro Devices, in Sunnyvale, Calif., tried a radically different approach to selling computers in middle-income nations with its Personal Internet Communicator, but it got out of that business late last year, selling the Communicator assets to Data Evolution Corp., of New Orleans. The Communicator’s future is unclear. With the same approach as FlexGo—selling in middle-income nations through ISPs—the Communicator looked radically different from a traditional PC. Shaped like a gray brick and customized by different ISPs with colorful plastic accents, the computer was designed for more rugged use than a traditional PC and optimized to use little power, featuring the same AMD Geode 500@1.0W processor used in the OLPC design. It came with 128 megabytes of RAM, a 10-gigabyte hard drive, and a 56-kilobit-per-second modem. The Communicator didn’t include native support for wireless Internet access or Ethernet; ISPs sold the machine with an adaptor that turned one of the device’s four USB ports into an Ethernet jack.

AMD compensated for the minimalist hardware by running a customized edition of Windows CE, a version of Windows designed for handheld devices. Unlike most versions of Windows, Windows CE is offered as “shared source” software, which allowed AMD to partially customize the software and let the device use some Windows XP applications.

Cable & Wireless, based in London, the primary ISP in the Caribbean, sold the Communicator with a mouse, a keyboard, and a CRT display for $350, discounted to $300 for high-speed Internet access subscribers. A Turkish ISP sold two packages, one with a CRT and another with an LCD panel monitor, for $280 and $440, respectively; both came with a foldable Razor-style scooter as a bonus gift with purchase.

The Communicator had to be attached to a monitor—and that was its weakness. While the Communicator itself used very little power and could be run off a 12-volt car battery as well as ac power, external monitors draw lots of power. CRT monitors draw roughly 150 watts when in use, but LCD monitors are more efficient, drawing roughly 50 W. Either one, however, dwarfed the power requirements of the Communicator itself and meant the Communicator wouldn’t work in regions without an electric grid.

One challenge such low-cost devices face is the falling price of conventional PCs. Chinese firm YellowSheepRiver Municator, in Macao, is selling a significantly fuller-featured PC (with a DVD drive, Wi-Fi, and larger memory and hard drive) for roughly $150, using Linux rather than Windows CE. The real question for the Communicator may be whether it’s sufficiently different from existing options. But the low price and the partnerships with local telephone companies may make it at least a moderate success.

Photo: Intel Corporation

EVALUATING EDUWISE: The technical specs of this low-cost laptop are still under wraps.

Another initiative, Intel’s Eduwise, launched in May 2006, appears to have many of the same goals as the OLPC project. Development on the Eduwise device is in a much earlier stage than that on the OLPC laptop, but Intel’s Paul Otellini, president and CEO, has promised a “full-featured” laptop, capable of running conventional Windows software, for $400. At the time of the launch, the company announced it planned to provide 300 000 Mexican teachers with such laptops, in cooperation with the Mexican government. But all anyone has seen of the Eduwise so far is its conceptual design—it looks like a woman’s purse. The technical specs are still under wraps.

And then there’s the cellphone. When Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, first announced his goal of creating a $100 laptop for the developing world, Microsoft executives suggested that he was on a fool’s errand because the perfect global computing platform already exists—the cellphone. Microsoft has since backed away from this particular argument, but there’s no denying the worldwide penetration of mobile phones. The technology research company, Gartner, in Stamford, Conn., predicts the sale of 850 million new handsets in 2006. Of those phones, 200 million will be purchased in China and India, and phones are selling well even in the poorest nations, including sub-Saharan Africa.

The impact of mobile phones in the developing world has been sudden and profound. Farmers use phones to check market prices and schedule deliveries. Businesspeople replace travel to meetings with phone calls. A study from the London Business School suggests that small increases in telephone ownership in nations is correlated with increases in economic success; and because wireless phone networks are easier to build than wired ones, entrepreneurs are blanketing the developing world with cell towers and selling millions of handsets.

In comparison to mobile phones, the global PC market is quite small—172 million machines sold in 2004, most in developed nations. It’s less clear that people are clamoring for PCs in the developing world the way they’ve sought out mobile phones. For many people, the economic impact of a PC is more distant than that of a phone—a phone means knowing that crops can sell for a higher price tomorrow, while a PC means a child may have a chance at a better job perhaps 15 years from now.

For an educational project that plans to teach the world’s children computer programming and replace textbooks with a handheld device, the mobile phone looks like an imperfect solution. But for companies hoping to capture consumer spending in developing nations, competition from increasingly powerful mobile phones may be a fearsome barrier to PC adoption.