But even more, the OLPC team didn’t rest on their laurels, and they are preparing a new tablet MID. This OLPC PC, in my opinion, is one of the most admirable technical achievements when you look at all the technical challenges they addressed, not speaking about the “political” challenges. ( Above: A child using the OLPC Laptop at Kigali’s airport where wireless Internet access is free. It is really more a netbook than a laptop because of its small size, its light weight and its 12 hours battery life. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) PC’s price is 100USD. A traditional laptop PC still costs around 500-800 USD. This should also benefit schools, as these devices are much less expensive than the traditional PCs. And, if the technology continues its steady march, they will experience mobile access to information and better understand the new innovations that such mobility makes possible. In doing so, the children will get familiar with this new category of devices that will be in use by the majority of people in Africa in the coming years. It is therefore important that schools in Africa that want to develop ICT awareness with their young students use these new mobile Internet devices. Africans are turning their late adoption of technology to their advantage by leapfrogging landlines and personal computers to mobile phones. Just as fixed, hard-wired systems will be replaced by cloud infrastructure, these new devices that bring Internet access to mobile phones will help Africa bypass the need for computers when linking into networks to access applications. Today, already one in three devices is a smartphone, a MID, or a netbook. These new mobile devices will become the user access devices of choice in the next five years. “The cell phone is no longer a gadget – it’s what IT is going to become,” said Jim Corgel, an IBM general manager of independent software vendors and developer relations told the Wall Street Journal. Ninety-one percent of IT professionals surveyed said cloud computing will overtake on-premise computing as the main way that businesses access data within the next five years. A recent IBM survey (2,000 information-technology professionals in 87 countries) found that more than half believe that within the next five years, more developers will be working on mobile applications and cloud-based architecture than traditional computing platforms for enterprise. It’s no secret this is where the innovation in IT is be heading. The iPad tablet was the next device announced by Apple in that new category of devices called Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). It was really the first complete integration between both a mobile phone and a PC platform that was Internet and multi-media enabled. It’s hard to believe that transformation began in earnest just three years ago when Apple announced the iPhone. The convergence between PCs, which are growing more mobile, and mobile phones, which are becoming more like PCs, is well under way.
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