Peru Orders 260,000 OLPC Laptops

The OLPC project continues to show success, as Peru signs an order for 260,000 OLPC XO laptops, and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim plans to bring 50,000 systems to his country.

Despite years of skepticism, higher-than-expected costs, and competition from commercial endeavors like the Intel Classmate PC, the One Laptop Per Child project continues to gain momentum, with the government of Peru signing a deal to purchase 280,000 of the systems. Thew news comes just as the first non-pilot deployment of OLPC notebooks gets underway in Uruguay, and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has purchased 50,000 of the systems for distribution to Mexican children.

The OLPC foundation is also seeing success with its Give One, Get One program, through which interested users in developed nations can purchase OLPC systems for their own use, and in the process donate one to a child in a developing nation. The program was recently extended through the end of 2007; participants in the Give One, Get One program also get free Wi-Fi access through T-Mobile for a year, and orders are reportedly totaling $2 million a day.

Nonetheless, the OLPC project faces strong hurdles, both from commercial competitors like the Intel Classmate PC and the Asus Eee PC (the latter of which is intended for more affluent markets, but is also being marketed to developing nations). The OLPC project also faces a price hurdle—the notebooks were originally inteded to be $100 each, but the final cost is about $188 per unit—and, more recently, a patent infringement lawsuit over its multilingual keyboard.