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It's a year since Negroponte's $100 PC, and Bill Gates has a better idea

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 30 January 2006

Last year at Davos, MIT luminary Nicholas Negroponte first tried to get the World Economic Forum interested in his "third world PC" for $100, and suffered some criticism - not least from this publication, where we suggested he'd be better off trying to sell phones. Now, Bill Gates is in Davos, saying the same thing.

According to the New York Times, Bill Gates demonstrated a mockup of his proposed cellular PC at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, "and he mentioned it as a cheaper alternative to traditional PC's and laptops during a public discussion here at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum."

The idea is a good one, perhaps, but it's not yet clear that Microsoft has any significant plans to take it forward. Editor John Markoff suggests that at least part of the motivation for Microsoft's initiative is pique, because Negroponte plans to use open source, not Windows, to run his clockwork computer.

From reports from Switzerland, it seems that power consumption is still a problem that the MIT project is dithering with. Negroponte has said he has a deal with a manufacturer (Quanta, in Taiwan) for the laptop; and that the processor chip will come from AMD.

If that's true, he had better not plan to generate the power to run it by hand-cranking the thing. AMD makes remarkable processors, but they aren't famous for their low-power performance.

"Roughly speaking, we reckon you can pedal a bicycle generator for an hour, to get six hours of battery life," said marketing director Richard Brown at VIA Technologies, when asked about this subject late last year. "Our chips are optimised for low power consumption, unlike others."

And Via founder Wenchi Chen, asked about the project last year, offered his famous quote: "Even if we built a nuclear power station a day for the next few years, we wouldn't have enough to drive all the PCs we're hoping to build," he warned.

Tags: Davos, Negroponte, Via Technologies, cellphone