In Lisbon today at noon, in the presence of the prime minister, local officials, and representatives of Intel, the first 50€ laptop will be launched. News was leaked yesterday, by local officials and the government, who promised to order 500,000 units for all primary schoolchildren starting in September, at the heavily subsidised price of 50€.
For the Portuguese government, this cannot come to soon. The country has been in the grip of an economic crisis for the best part of a year now, with no apparent end in sight, and despite everything they have done, and to be fair they have been as much of the cause of the crisis as the solution, the creation of 1.000 new jobs in Matosinhos, near Lisbon, can only be good news.
The new computer, called Magellan (Magalhães), is intended to be the flagship of Intel's Classmate PC. Originally, Intel was a part of the One Laptop Per Child programme, which aimed to create low-cost PC's for education in third world countries, but disagreements at the start of the year meant they went their own way, and developed the Classmate PC.
In brief, the Magellan is a small laptop with a 7-inch TFT screen and no hard disk. It contains a 900MHz Celeron M CPU, with 256MB of RAM and runs Microsoft Windows XP Embedded Version 2002, with Service Pack 2. To give additional memory, the computer contains a 1Gb flash memory drive, but also has two USB ports, one for additional memory, and one for a wifi adaptor. It also has an ethernet connection and headphone sockets. For a full review see here.
The Portuguese government has been supporting new technology in schools as a part of it's e-schools programme (“e.escola”), which has subsidised laptops to students (discounting the VAT) and a deal for schoolchildren where they could buy a laptop for 150€ plus a monthly 15€ fee for wi-fi internet access. This deal, to provide the Magalhães to all primary school children, is part of a new programme called “e.escolinha", or little e-schools.
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