Taipei, May 21, 2007 (CENS)--Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer of the OLPC Foundation, a non-profit organization sponsoring a U.N.-led project of "one laptop per child" (OLPC Project) for billions of children all over the world, recently announced that the first batch of laptops for the project will be delivered from Shanghai in September.

Based on demand from one billion children in the world, the production volume of OLPC`s low-price laptops, priced at US$100 per unit, is expected to reach 10 million units per month within two years.

Jepsen added that there have been 25 countries willing to participate in the project so far, and the OLPC will complete the exact estimation of required low-price laptop shipment by the end of May.

The low-price laptop for the OLPC project is named XO, which adopts 92% of components made by Taiwanese suppliers, and is exclusively assembled by the Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc. Shipment of such laptop series is considerable, heavily affecting Taiwan`s electronics industry.

With arge-sized international PC suppliers venturing into the market for low-price PCs, OLPC is proud of the specifications and prices of the XO laptop series. Furthermore, OLPC has initiated a project for developing US$50 laptops, according to Jepsen.

She said that the XO laptop series has been upgraded by adopting the XL700 AMD X86 central processing unit, 256MB DRAM, and 1GB flash memory. The upgraded version is priced at US$175 and will be cut down to US$100 in 2009.

OLPC`s XO laptop series uses Microsoft`s embedded operating system, which requires special drivers to work. However, this increases the cost by nearly US$20 for the laptop, including US$3 for Microsoft`s operating system, and US$15 for a 2GB flash memory to drive the system, Jepsen mentioned.
(by Steve Chuang)