Thoughts 17 Jan 2008 09:07 pm
Intel Classmate to be sold in India
As of Jan 26, the Intel Classmate, being made by HCL Infosystems, is to be sold in India as the MiLeap X.
In spite of the similarities HCL insists that while their’s may be based on the Classmate it’s an entirely different machine.
The MiLeap is a shade of brown instead of blue.
The MiLeap has an HCL logo instead of an Intel logo.
Both computers have a 7-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen with 800-pixel by 480-pixel resolution, a 900MHz Celeron M processor, Wi-Fi, and 2G bytes of flash memory for storage instead of a hard drive. They also use the same chipset, Intel’s 915GMS.
George Paul, executive vice president of HCL, acknowledged the MiLeap X can be considered a “derivative” of the Classmate PC since both computers use similar technologies, but said significant differences exist between the two products. He did not specify what those differences are. —I guess someone forgot to tell the Executive VP just what it is they’re trying to sell.
Ok, the MiLeap X runs Linux and is for sale to consumers in India, while the Classmate runs Linux and is designed to be sold to schools in developing countries.
They certainly sound like entirely different machines to me.
As a side note:
It seems the Indian government gave the OLPC a pass because there was no provision for teacher control, among other things.