MIT's $100 Hand Powered Laptop.

MIT's Media Lab (read: Nicholas Negroponte) has announced a design for a low cost, hand powered laptop geared for third world children's use in education. The computer, which at this point is only a specification, has several interesting features as seen in these pictures, including a display that can show color or black and white, a crank for manual power provision where electricity is unavailable, and various open source applications running on a Linus OS. Google, Advanced Micro Devices, News Corp., Red Hat and BrightStar are working with MIT to develop between 5 and 15 milllion test units. Microsoft has been working on this same project for some time, so look for an announcement from Redmond (or more appropriately the MSFT research facility in Mountain View) soon.