At last, the $129 computer
By Gareth Powell
China now has a personal computer going on sale for very little money. The US$129 (RMB998) Tian En GX-2 has been was developed by Sichuan Guoxin Technology, based in the western Chinese city of Chengdu.
It is being sold as a low-cost system for China’s rural areas which are falling behind in the digital race.It is based on a 400MHz MIPS processor from Raza Microelectronics and runs either a version of the Linux operating system or a Chinese developed operating system called FutureAlpha. It has 128MB of memory, a USB port, an Ethernet adapter and a double cunning move this, a 1GB SD memory card which acts as the hard disk.
True, the price does not include a monitor although it will bung out a signal at VGA standard and also has a TV output which may mean that in some homes it will be linked up to the telly.
It comes with software installed — an Internet browser, a Chinese-English dictionary and a calendar application for managing appointments.
The illustration could very possibly be the very machine. It comes from the same factory but whether this is it precisely has to be checked.
Before we have a flood of comments saying this was announced in some computer magazine yonks ago, a small explanation is due. The transliteration of Chinese words in English is an art not a science. Indeed, the middle name of the company concerned can be read three ways. As can the names of the chips.
We do not put the Chinese characters in because that would not suit our readers. But, for the record, the writer is the associate publisher of the China Economic Review, has five blogs on Chinese matters and been working with the Chinese since there were wolves in Wales.
So does a machine at this price exist? Yes. Is that its picture above? Possibly. Will the computer ever be launched on the world scene? No. Does it mean, however, that computers will continue to come down in price? Yes.
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February 7th, 2007
That’s a great idea.
(And not only that, it looks good too!)
February 7th, 2007
This has nothing to do with the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project, right?
February 7th, 2007
No, it is not, Nor should it be allowed to detract from it. There are, I guess, about 20 firms making inexpensive machines and the idea is to crack $199 when the market becomes seriously huge. But the One Laptop Per Child, mainly the brainwave of Nicholas Negroponte, comes at it another way and has a machine that can be hand-cranked. In a sense they are both for different markets but both intensely praiseworthy.
Gareth
February 8th, 2007
… for that price, I prefer a used pentium III with a 20 gig hard drive running Win2K