Intel's announcement reflects several years of research on the needs of users in poor countries. That research was initially conducted under the project name The Next 10 Percent and began when 10 percent of the world's population had PCs, says Tony Salvador, director of ethnography and design research in Intel's Emerging Markets Platform unit.

Friday's announcement was only one of several steps Intel is taking to encourage technology adoption in nontraditional markets. On Wednesday, Intel unveiled a product it has demonstrated several times in recent months -- the Community PC, which is designed for use in rural India.

That PC reflects design ethnography of the sort Salvador practices. The Community PC is rugged, designed to withstand temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius and equipped with a special monitor and filters to deal with dust. It comes with a software-restore key that will rebuild the system's software at a keystroke if the PC fails. Finally, it can use a car battery as a backup power source, which is useful in areas where power failures are a daily fact of life. The PC will switch automatically between AC and DC power.

Though the Community PC, with a 15-inch color monitor, a 40-gigabyte hard disk, and 128 megabytes of RAM, will not compete with Negroponte's $100 PC in cost, Salvador argues that it "is a concrete example of what it really costs" to bring personal computing to regions poor both economically and in basic power infrastructure. "How do you service it? How do you connect it? Those costs have to be factored in."