NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE'S wind-up laptop certainly seems to have wound up an entire industry.

While for years the focus has been on an upgrade cycle that puts more power on your desk or between your sweaty knees, the One Laptop Per Child initiative suddenly sent the hype skidding back up its own rear.

Negroponte's idea was focused on enabling the unwired millions to join the wired world. The trouble for the established manufacturing giants turned out to be that first-world folk realised that they too were victims of the hype.

Why spend a forune on some super-duper new fangled lump of machinery that'll pump out out billions of pixels per millisecond at a screen as wide as John Prescott's trousers when all I really want to do is noodle about on Ebay or Facebook and send a few emails, the well-heeled masses began to ask themselves.

And thus a whole new product sector was born.

Latest to enter the low-cost fray is Dell. Dell's somewhat tardy entrance to the market will come courtesy of Compal, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

A Compal official told the Journal that his firm will ship two miilion low-cost laptops to Dell this year. These, like most everything else will be made in China, we assume.

Strange isn't it, how these low-cost laptops were designed for places like China, are built there and are shipped out to have a Dell badge stuck on them before being flogged on, presumably many of them back to the Chinese.

As Compal says on its web site, " Compal has wined the trust of costumers and developed itself into one of the main leading companies in the global IT industry." And you can't say fairer than that. µ