OLPC gets a boost: 500,000 units ordered by U.N. for Palestinian children

Good news all around. An initiative in the West Bank has an order for 500,000 PCs from the One Laptop Per Child organization. Several thousand have already been delivered, and the rest are hoped to arrive over the next couple years. Not in a hurry, I perceive: by then we’ll likely see the rumored OLPC tablet with Pixel Qi screen. But these kids aren’t gadget hounds, they’re kids, and hopefully the suite of activities and tools that comes with the OLPC will help the teachers there get some teaching done.

Although the original goals of saturating the world with XO units seems out of reach now, there’s still a lot of good to be done. Even the growth of competitors like the Classmate PC signals that a low-cost, single-purpose computer like this is a compelling device — if they can only get governments, who sign all the big contracts, to agree.

In this case, it’s the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is working on behalf of kids and refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Good for them.

Off-topic comments will be deleted, by the way.

[via ComputerWorld]

This post is tagged: aren, bank, child organization, classmate, classmate pc, computer, computerworld, Contracts, couple, device, gadget, gaza, governments, growth, Headline, hounds, hurry, initiative, Jordan, laptop, laptop per child, Lebanon, lebanon syria, lot, mdash, news, olpc, order, Organization, Per Child, pixel, purpose computer, reach, refugees, rest, screen, several thousand, signals, suite, Syria, Tablet, teaching, topic comments, united nations, West, west bank, world