Quanta has agreed to devote significant engineering resources from the Quanta Research Institute (QRI) in Q1 and Q2, 2006, with a target of bringing the product to market in Q4. The launch of 5-15 million units will be done both in large-scale pilot projects in seven culturally diverse countries (China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand), with one million units in each of these countries; and an additional modest allocation of machines to seed developer communities in a number of other selected countries. A commercial version of the machine will be explored in parallel.

Barry Lam, founder and chairman, Qanta, said, "Quanta would like to contribute its industry-leading laptop technologies to the future success of the project, in hope of affording children worldwide with opportunities not only to close the 'digital divide,' but also to bridge the 'knowledge divide.' This project signifies a new stage and scale for the laptop industry, by including those children never before considered to be laptop users."

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a Delaware-based, non-profit organization, created by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty members from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute sufficiently inexpensive laptops in order to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools, on the basis of one laptop per child.

These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection. The pricing goal will start near $100 and then steadily decrease. The corporate members of OLPC are Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat. Click to Open Web Page