You've heard of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) with its bid to put a $100 laptop in the hands of children the world round, but how about a tiny slice of silicon that only costs twelve bucks? According to ABC News, it's already in the cards, thanks to a 27-year-old graduate student named Derek Lomas, who plucked a couple of cheap game-playing gadgets off the street while kicking around Bangalore, India, last February.
His idea? Take the notion of a $10 to $20 game machine using an NES processor and turn it into a $12 quasi-computing contraption with modifications like flash memory, wireless connectivity, and educational software. A kind of "Sharp Wizard" for the 21st century.
The Doctor PC Junior, essentially a Nintendo Famicom (NES) clone with a built-in disk drive, designed as a learning tool for children in China and Hong Kong.
OLPC's laptops today actually costs $187 -- nearly double their PR-friendly price -- and when you start adding extras to Lomas's proposal, you can bet it'll cost more than its promotional twelve bucks too. But according to Silicon Valley Tech analyst Rob Enderle, it's more importantly about redefining the floor, then introducing modularity.
"Twelve dollars is an awful lot of money to [emerging countries], and they might only need certain capabilities. If you start with a $12 core you can probably add a lot of that stuff and stay under $50," he says.
While no one's (yet) talking about games for Lomas's $12 concept, OLPC has its own list of dozens, as well as a dedicated game development wiki. Making even casual games an optional component for a simplistic $12 computer would almost certainly help drive sales.
And to think, twelve bucks this side of the pond barely covers the cost of a movie ticket with small popcorn, a copy of The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, or one-fifth the cost of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Madden NFL '09.
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