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Friday, February 03, 2006 The Laptop vs. Cell Phone DebateThe cell phone offers an interesting alternative to the $100 laptop; however, the economics don't add up. By Eric Hellweg
At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last week, a fissure appeared over what technology would be most effective in improving education in the third world. On one side: the highly-publicized One Laptop per Child Project (usually just called the "$100 laptop"), spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab. On the other: a cell phone featuring PC capabilities, an idea that's being promoted by Microsoft. The $100 laptop project, first announced at last year's Davos gathering, aims to distribute seven million computers featuring open-source software, mesh-networking capabilities, and a hand-crank shaft for power, beginning in fall 2006. Meanwhile, although Microsoft hasn't announced any products for this rest-of-world market, at the consumer electronics show last month in Las Vegas, Bill Gates demonstrated a mockup of a cell phone that included ports for a keyboard and an external monitor. And at this year's Davos meeting, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technical officer, told the New York Times that he and Bill Gates believed the best way to bring the advances of the digital age to poorer parts of the world was with cell phones. "Everyone is going to have a cell phone," Mundie said in the Times interview. "We have a lot of concerns about the sustainability of [the laptop] approach." Certainly, no one doubts the magnanimity of Negroponte's effort. But anytime such a huge -- and visionary -- project is taken on, it becomes a target for second-guessers and naysayers. The $100 laptop effort has been under intense scrutiny since it was first announced a year ago, with critics questioning its feasibility, the decision to have third-world governments distribute them, whether they'll be targets for thieves, and whether the whole idea smacks of "let them eat cake." Shiv Bakhshi, with research firm IDC, thinks that developing nations don't have the same "cultural constructs" for laptops as they do for cell phones and televisions, and, as a result, their citizens may be less inclined to interact with a laptop. More pressingly, the laptop project doesn't have a customer support network. If a laptop breaks down, how will the owner fix it? With cell phones, it's likely that network providers and possibly handset manufacturers will have support programs in place. Another argument in favor of cell phones is simply their growing presence. Cell phone sales will reach one billion units by 2009, according to the Gartner Group -- with much of the growth coming from developing nations. What's more, cell phone manufacturers have lowered the cost of their products significantly: in the last 18 months from around $35 per phone to $20, according to European manufacturer Infineon.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
Guest (Robert Vaessen) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (Robert Vaessen) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (Robert Vaessen) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (Robert Vaessen) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (alokmohan) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (msdemott@mit.edu) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (Leila) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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There is also a reference in one of Domenico de Masi's book about education in Athenas: education means also to have fun.
How interesting is to see that children (and adults) could have access to education with mobility, and probably with fun.
On the other hand, it is also inspiring to follow up a multi cultural team working to give access to education to low income groups.
Guest (Vijay Thombre) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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ftmartinez19958 on 08/14/2007 at 4:15 PM
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I believe not only cell phones will be around the socity, but will anvancying to laptops in 10-20 years or so.
Guest (Julio Velasco) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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The $100 laptop is self-powered, runs open source freeware, provides adhoc networking, has a large viewing area and a built-in keyboard.
The cell phone needs electricity to recharge, requires separate components for viewing and typing, can only connect to proprietary networks and will use a proprietary OS and applications.
Who is Gates kidding? My kudos to Negraponte and MIT!
Guest (Gabe) on 02/03/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (Shiva Hanumanahally) on 02/05/2006 at 12:00 AM
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(just dock it in to use a usual keyboard and monitor with optical bus) it would still be different
from whats been envisioned for developing countries through the $100 laptop. Dont mix both.
Guest (Ian Parker) on 02/04/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (TheTónster) on 02/06/2006 at 12:00 AM
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the Hundred-Dollar Laptop should be the way to go. Self-powered. One can get flashlights now that need only to be squeezed a few times to light a path through the darkness. The Africans will power their laptops with a treadle. Let us here praise Science & Technology for good service to God!
steven2duong on 09/16/2006 at 12:43 AM
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This is my first time writing, and no one will probably pick this up since it's already mid-September! Anyway, I'm glad to see that we're all debating on something positive. To this, I'd like to add my thoughts. There's a couple of things that I think needs to be considered: 1) Efficient flow and access to information is critical, and 2) Hardware must be minimized. To my first point, I would argue that efficient flow of information is more critical than putting an entire encyclopedia into a laptop that cannot be connected. Lasting positive change is not a one year, two year or three year solution or a hundred volumes-worth of encyclopedias. Lasting change is about creating conducive environments for learning and business. Great business and education environments need efficient structures first, where they can access an infinite pool of information that no encyclopedia could ever hold. The internet is the largest encyclopedia there is, and I would argue that access to the internet should take precedence over anything else. Now, to my second point...minimizing hardware. This is pretty obvious...the more hardware you have, the more expensive it's likely to be to replace. This may not be the case now, but let's look back at the cell phone, which once was a clunker and expensive. Now, cell phones have gotten extremely small and cheaper. Eventually, the majority of the cost of a cell phone will lie in the raw material itself.
Now aside from my 2 main arguments above, there are still several issues that cell phones need to overcome:
First is lack of a power source.
Second is poor input devices.
Third is the lack of good visual displays.
And fourth is lack of processing power.
To answer all these points, I'd like to give a little tidbit about myself. I've recently in the past couple of years caught the travelling bug and love to travel. And my favorite places to travel are the places least travelled such as third world countries (I live in NY so going to another developed city is not that exciting to me). And one of the places I'm attached to and frequent very often is Panama. In Panama, I've noticed a few interesting observations: 1) Almost everyone has a cell phone including some people in very distant parts (I've seen native Indians with cell phones!), and 2) There's an awful lot of internet cafes in Panama City. To my first point, it should come as no shock that many 3rd world people have cell phones. Prices have gone down so much and there have been pay as you go plans that the value proposition for cell phones in Panama is very high...high enough for an Indian to get and be able to contact his fellow brother on another island. To my second point, it appears that Panamanians are people like us who want to interact with others and find what they need on the internet. In addition, it would also signal to me that Panamanians don't have computers of their own...why go to an internet cafe when you can do what you need at home? This is because the barrier to entry is so high that it's simply not worth it (at least they believe this to be so) and that $0.25/30 minutes at the internet cafe is worth it. So to sum up my two points about Panama (a third world country), cell phones are fairly prevalent, and people like the internet and computers, and the barrier is too high for them to get access on their own.
So in the case of Panama, it seems that a cell phone is the better way to go, however, it needs to resolve the four issues I stated above.
To my first issue of power, I don't have a good answer to that currently, however, I'd like to add a few points. First, to build a sustainable economy requires positive phases, not immediate results. What I mean by this is that there are plenty of poor people with electricity in Panama that can benefit. And if we can raise their standard of living, they will most likely move up the chain and a new fringe group will be developed. This is similar to the real estate market in NY where parts of Brooklyn now are somewhat comparable to many parts of Manhattan. Second, on one of my trips to a few of the villages way out on the Caribean coast (no road access...it was pretty rough), all the villages had at lest one generator from someone. It's possible that these generators could provide the necessary recharging power for the cell phones (a little government creativity would probably help here too).
To my second issue on adequate input devices...here I think it just requires a company to be creative and committed to providing a cheap, durable keyboard. Off the top of my head, I'm dreaming of a "rubberized" keyboard that is foldable. I'm not exactly the tech guy here, but I have to imagine that if you put a couple of MIT, Harvard, Yale, etc. students together in a room and a collaboration effort for a week, someone will figure the appropriate solution out.
To my third point, technology has advanced so far and so fast that if we look bak at the last 50 years and compare it with the last 10, we can see where we're headed exponentially. The amount of progress will be overwhelming in the next 5 to 10 years. So for the visuals, there are already companies that are producing some amazing, and potentially cost efficient and durable visual displays. The companies to check out for are http://www.plasticlogic.com/index.php and http://www.eink.com/. I'm sure our concepts of desktops, laptops, tablets, and plain old books and newspapers will be radically changed within 5 to 10 years.
To my last point on processing power...if anyone has worked in the corporate world, they may have stumbled on terminal services. For those not familiar with it, it's a pretty neat concept. I realized the power of it when speaking with one of my developers about programming in some changes to our app for me. He said he'd do it from home through terminal services. The two main benefits are that 1) he has access to internal development tools and files, and 2) the intense processing isn't done by his local machine at home, but by our company machine in the office, which is much more powerful. So what terminal services offers is the ability to control a remote computer (that may be many times more powerful) and receive a visual representation of what the remote computer displays. Pretty revolutionary in my opinion, though this technology has been around for quite some time. So what's the big whoop? Well, the big whoop is about me terminal servicing into my Google/Yahoo/MSN, etc. account via my cell phone and interacting with the services that these companies provide through my portable keyboard and my "paper" monitor. So in my opinion, services is where it's going to be at in the future for developing markets. And why would someone like Google do this? Well, capacity has apparently gotten so cheap that gaining marketshare is now the most important part of many internet businesses with valid business models. This services trend seems already quite obvious.
There are still many things to consider, one of which is the cost of surfing the net via cell phones. To this I don't have a solution, except lobbying cellular service providers to tweak their business models slightly to include a advertisements to cover their costs. Lobbying government to subsidize free internet would also be a potential solution. I can't think of many better investments than this.
And lastly, to the point about Bill Gates being self-serving...I think in the end we have to look at what our main purpose is. Is it to make sure that Bill Gates doesn't take anymore money from someone? Or is it to raise the standard of living for 3rd world people through education? If it turns out that paying Bill Gates raises the standard of living 10 fold in the long run, versus going with a free system that only raises the standard of living 5 fold, then it may be worth it to give Bill our money. I'm not arguing either way, but my point is that it's really a side topic that may skew objective analysis. BTW, I think Bill is the largest philanthropist, but again...a side topic for another forum. Regards!