India’s $10 Laptop is Just a $30 Hard Drive

We knew it had to be too good to be true. With the OLPC guys struggling to get down to the $100 price point, a ten dollar laptop should have sounded outside of the realm of possibility. We should have known.

After much hullabaloo over the possibility of a notebook PC for just ten bucks, we have now learned that the project was totally blown out of proportion. It’s not a laptop. It’s not a computer. The system being built by Vellore Institute of Technology students in India is actually just a “computing device.”

What kind of “computing device” are they proclaiming for 500 rupees? What they once referred to as a laptop is a “storage device containing megabytes of data info which can be accessed by a user by connecting this device to a laptop.” Yup, it’s nothing more than a portable hard drive (or USB flash drive). Worse yet, it only contains megabytes of data. Less than a gig? Seriously?

To add insult to injury, this “storage device” won’t even be available for the promised $10 price point. Instead, the 10-inch by 5-inch device will be priced at around the $30 range. We’ve all just received a double kick in the junk.