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Brazil's first Intel Classmate PC given to o presidente
The odd public relations battle among the various manufacturers of super-low-cost laptops is heating up once again, with Intel ceremoniously delivering Brazil's first Classmate PC to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (presumably it will not be his primary machine). The low-power Classmate -- competing with OLPC's XO and Encore's Mobilis for a bulk contract and presumably lucrative support deals -- was part of an initial lot of 30 machines for government eggheads to play with, and will be followed by a donation of 800 units sometime next month. Unlike the $150 XO, the Classmate is a multi-hundred dollar machine with some fairly decent specs -- for its class, at least -- as it features a Celeron M CPU, 256MB of DDR2 RAM, and 1GB of NAND flash, among other "luxuries." With this seemingly heated competition to provide cheap notebooks to the children of Brazil, it's amusing to think that along with teaching them about coding, writing, and web surfing, these little gadgets will also bring them another proud tradition of developed countries: the OS war.
Encore's Mobilis to compete with OLPC XO, Classmate PC in Brazil
While we didn't exactly expect the educational, beneficial, and "world-changing" laptops that are headed out to children all across the globe to battle it out like Intel and AMD, we guess a little competition can't hurt too much. Just days after getting word that Intel's Classmate PC would be tackling OLPC's XO, only to be joined by a dark horse Indian offering shortly thereafter, we now know precisely who that lucky third wheel is. Encore Software will reportedly offer up "around 50" of its Linux-based Mobilis machines for evaluation within Brazil, setting up a three-way grudge match between Doom-playing ultraportables. The machines will supposedly sport 7- to 7.5-inch LCD touchscreens, six hours of battery life, VGA output, Ethernet / 56k modem, optional GRPS / GPS modules, optional biometric scanner, stereo speakers, microphone, audio in / out, and a bevy of "hot keys" to activate your typical office applications. Although we've no idea how much Encore hopes to make off these things, we sure hope they prepped those demo units for battle before mailing them out.
