Elonex, a UK-based company, recently announced it’s going to be offering a Linux-based laptop for just under a hundred pounds. They’re calling it the Elonex ONE, and it’s tough not to see it as a dig at MIT’s One Laptop Per Child project.

Initially, the One Laptop Per Child project was aiming to build a simple laptop that could be sold for $100. Unfortunately, this proved a bit too ambitious, and the price is actually closer to $200. Also, the laptops build were intended just for kids from under-developed countries, and unavailable to us first worlders. I can get behind that, but the XO (the official name of the laptops) is such a fun-looking gadget, I can’t help but want to get my hands on one. I’m not the only one who feels that way, and the OLPC foundation tapped into that sentiment by offering to let us wealthy yanks buy one for $400. The $400 pays for a laptop for us, and pays for a second XO to be donated to someone somewhere else who could never afford it.

Elonex’s ideals aren’t quite so lofty, as it appears that they’ll be willing to ship the ONE to whomever is willing to hand over the cash money. That’s fine, but the OLPC project kind of gives me the misty-eyed warm fuzzies thinking about underprivileged youths from rural Africa discovering MySpace and HTML and mp3s. The Elonex ONE conjures visions of opportunistic English businessmen trying to ride the XO buzz to a tidy profit.

What really reveals the different approaches is the design of the two products. Have a look:

The Elonex ONE laptop
The One Laptop Per Child XO laptop

OLPC XO = Awesome. Elonex ONE = Turd. It’s obvious at a glance that the OLPC people really put their hearts and souls into making the best computer they could for the kids, while the Elonex people put their hearts and souls… elsewhere. It looks like a glorified V-Tech. Actually, it doesn’t even look glorified.

We’ll see, maybe they’re actually nice little machines, but I’m a bit of a cynic.

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