I have a different angle on this. I had been thinking of the prospect of converting a DVD player design to a third world computer with addition of a USB ports, software and JAVA/Linux (touch screen webpad or laptop design for Portable DVD players). It turns out that DVD chipset makers are loath to open up their chipsets to third part development.

It then occurred to me the PS2 could do this and more, and having paid for it's R&D and manufacture development, it could be sold cheap. The PSP design adds more to this, and would be suitable for a $100 laptop. These products could be sold in upgraded 1GHz versions eventually, and would give Sony a whole new market for old software and hardware (cheap $1 downloaded-$10-$20 games). I hope Sony is listening.


Wayne Morellini.

WinCE doesn't give enough software compatibility. It's either Linux or full Dimdows--nothing else is going to give you a proper desktop experience.

Hang on there, did it really take them this long to worry about Internet accessibility ?
I mean, heck, we've only been hearing about low-cost-notebooks-for-the-3rd-world for, what is it, three years already ?
You say Gartner has often been wrong. Well, if they've been right only as many times as they've been wrong, then it means that, as a forecasting business, they're worthless and you could arguably replace their forecasts with flipping a dime.
Or is it the summer student that drafted this one ?
Personally, I wish they would just shut up instead of publishing embarrassing statements such as this one.

Claiming IT development of any kind being years away is like "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill

Gartner seems to see the costs of IT and not the benefits. Emerging markets will build infrastructure that is appropriate for them and do not need to replicate costly mistakes made years ago in established markets. They can skip wired and go wireless, for instance. Smaller machines need far less power so solar or wind can supply power without the need for a massive grid.

Another technology that is available in cities that is not widely used in established markets is the thin client/server. Internet cafes and such can use thin clients and use a bunch of the $100 machines and a single more powerful machine to the work. This permits a school or a cooperative or a small business to use a lot of IT very inexpensively.

What do you call this
http://www.jointech.com.hk/jl7100.html

Man I need to turn in a resume at Gartner. I can make wild ass predictions too. Now I want to get paid for them.

Expect the resume soon Gartner. I predict you will hire me after you read my resume too because its full of fictio... errr.. facts! Yes FACTS!

new world by opening e-mails from sources other than Microsoft and Intel.
No shame found though!

http://www.jointech.com.hk/jl7100.html

Sure it's WinCE based, with just 64MB of storage, but if you've got Office,mail, IE, and even MSN, and few media apps for images/sound/video - what more do you need? Just plug in USB stick for more storage, or stream from the WWW.

For 99$, it ain't bad!

They're just proving to everyone that they don't know what they're talking about: http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8624&Itemid=38

... because here's one at $99, and you don't need to buy 1000. You can buy just 1. 

http://www.jointech.com.hk/jl7100.html

see also

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8624&Itemid=1

or almost a laptop since it has no storage
http://www.jointech.com.hk/jl7100.html