Given the problems One Laptop Per Child has confronted in recent months, documented here and in last week’s Economist, it’s hardly surprising that “green computing” specialist CherryPal Inc. , a California subsidiary of Tristate Hong Kong Group Ltd., would try to enter the developing-nation market with a $99 smartbook called Africa. But the fact that this platform relies on a 400-MHz RISC processor from China dubbed “XBurst,” offered by Ingenic Semiconductor, makes us wonder if CherryPal might run into as many real-world problems as OLPC evangelist Nicholas Negroponte. Problem is, CherryPal scarcely has the global cachet of Negroponte and his team. In addition, press reports variously describe the processor as based on ARM or MIPS-II, which suggests that full licensing rights might be, shall we say, spotty.
CherryPal founder Max Seybold says the company was not entering the sub-laptop market from simple altruism, but had been approached by Philip Appiah of Paajaf Foundation in Ghana, who wanted better alternatives for sub-$100 netbooks or smartbooks than he’d seen from OLPC and others. Maybe he had heard about the problems in Rwanda in working with OLPC.
CherryPal told PC Magazine that low prices depended upon a low-power, non-standard RISC implementation, and that Ingenic was only the first of what could be many suppliers, though the company would rely on XBurst or similar low-cost ARM or MIPS devices.
The Africa smartbook features a 7-in., 600 x 800 display. Connectivity options include 802.11, Ethernet, dual USB 1.1 and single USB 2.0 ports. Main memory includes a scant 256 Mbytes of SDRAM and 2 Gbytes of NAND flash. The baseline system has a slot for HDD, but no integrated hard drive, and SD card slots. Africa runs on either Windows CE or Linux, though future Android implementations were not ruled out.
The company already is taking orders for Africa in its OpenStore. The fact that the nonprofit OLPC is facing competition in unique implementations from a company that seeks a profit margin may help drive innovation, but CherryPal is taking its chances with the untested XBurst. There are many good RISC designers in China, but the uncertainty as to whether XBurst is based on an ARM or MIPS instruction set raises questions as to whether it could run into legal problems in global distribution. If Negroponte faced difficulties in both supply and design in moving to the OLPC XO-2, how many more problems might CherryPal encounter in getting the Africa distributed in Africa?
Loring
