The dream of making low-cost computing and internet access available to underprivileged third-world communities is a fairly old one. The poster child of this effort is arguably the One Laptop Per Child initiative, a non-profit formed in January 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte, a faculty member of the MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts, US — the dream, though, has been around since 1997.

Since formation, they have managed to distribute about 1.3 million laptops, but the cost per laptop is still too high — about $200/unit. The dream is $100/unit, and it seems that local entrepreneurs Mark Levy and Neil Watson have taken a big step towards cracking it with the Vodacom Linkbook, a device which (according to Vodacom) costs R960 total — just over $125.

Unfortunately it’s not without some nagging doubts. For one, the Linkbook requires a 24-month contract with Vodacom, and costs R199/month. The bundle includes 300MB of data every month, which effectively boils down to 10MB/day — barely enough to do any decent surfing.

Secondly, according to the TechCentral review on the device, the keyboard’s cramped, the software is still buggy and cryptic in some areas, and the battery life is awful — 90 minutes on a full charge, with 3G and WiFi enabled (120 minutes if they’re turned off).

So is this really a step in the right direction? As limited as the device is, it might be.

Feature-wise, the Linkbook has 16GB of SSD storage, 256MB of RAM and the aforementioned 2-hour battery life. It runs a derivative of Ubuntu (Heron, an outdated version) with the KDE desktop, and has been tailored for inexperienced users — making it more difficult for experienced users to get the most out of the device.

When it comes down to it, it’s basically capable of browsing, email, documents and music playback. I own an EEEPC with similar specs, and a 350MB AVI file has trouble playing on it, so I’d imagine this device wouldn’t be too good with large chunks visual media — and definitely not with Flash (ala Zoopy, Youtube, Facebook, etc).

Hardware and cost aside, the question remains: is it worth getting 300MB of wireless internet access for R200/month, along with a netbook to use it with? Considering that, despite the limitations, the netbook is at least functional, and it does make the internet accessible to the end user at an average cost of R6.67/day for 10MB, the answer may be “yes”, but it’s an incredibly tentative “yes”, what with the contract hanging over the whole deal.

One potential pitfall here is the device’s limited capability. As people’s skills grow, so too will their demands for performance, and it won’t be very long into the lifecycle of the Linkbook that new expectations won’t be met.

Another potential pitfall is the fact that the target audience (low income, but basically computer literate) have in all likelihood been trained on Windows. Microsoft (in association with local government organisations) runs about 190 training centres around the country, and they’re teaching Windows, Office and Internet Explorer.

While the Linkbook has been simplified, it doesn’t ship with the same user experience that this market might be expecting, and they might not be able to make the most of the device because of this.

Of course, by the time the average customer realises that the Linkbook is inadequate, it’s too late — the contract doesn’t expire for 24 months, and buying your way out will probably cost you in excess of R4 500 — money which could otherwise buy, say, a Samsung N130, with a 10.2” LCD, 160GB SATA harddrive, 1GB ram and an 8h battery life, complete with XP.

In my opinion, Vodacom could do better by offering a slightly more capable netbook at R1 200 — R1 500/unit, and leave the bandwidth up to prepaid. This has the potential to seriously undercut the current market, while introducing devices that meet most expectations, and caters for an audience that is already used to prepaid packages on their cellphones.

Either way, this whole project is a step forward, and that’s a good thing. The $100 laptop is truly in sight now.

• None

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.