$100 MIT computer“The performance of Longmeng, or Dragon Dream, is equivalent to a 1G Pentium III desktop… It is a computer, a DVD player and also a video game player. The computer, equipped with standard PC accessories, is portable as it is the size of a textbook and weighs 500 grams.” – Onlypunjab.com via David Farber’s email list.

The TeleRead take: This could be good news for the MIT-related $100 laptop project (early prototype shown) since it helps validate the concept. Certainly it would be interesting to compare the feature sets and e-book-related capabilities of the two machines. Launch is to happen in June. Excerpt:

Costing around 1,000 yuan (125 U.S. Dollars), the low-cost computer uses a Chinese-made Godson II CPU.

“We hope everyone can afford our computers,” said Zhang Fuxin, an expert of the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in charge of developing “Longmeng” computers.

Update, 6:13 p.m.: A blog item from Alec Tang, found via Google’s cache, describes the machine as a $187 Linux laptop available from a company called the Menglan Group.

NO COMMENTS

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.