The $37 Laptop. For Real

Walk into any toy store and you’ll see a “laptop” “computer”, a plastic clamshell that has all of the design cues of a notebook: keyboard, screen, some ports and switches, but none of the power. It’s cheap enough to buy for (and disappoint) a kid, but it isn’t of course a real computer. It probably has a few built in games and that’s it.

The Ebay $37 laptop is almost that same machine, although it looks even more like the computers it pretends to be. It runs Windows CE on a 300 MHz ARM VIA processor with 128kb RAM and a whopping 2GB storage. The huge bezel around the tiny 7-inch 800 x 480 screen has space for a pair of speakers either side, and you even get an ethernet jack and a couple USB ports (take that, iPad) along with Wi-Fi. You can also slot-in an SD card.

What’s the catch (apart from the extraordinarily underpowered internals)? There appears to be none. These are factory seconds or items which have failed quality control tests. They may or may not come with original packaging, and they ship from Hong Kong. Sound risky? C’mon. They’re $37. What do you expect? It’s almost worth it just for the AC adapter (9 volts, if you care).

If you run into Nicholas Negroponte and he’s still trying to make his $100 OLPC, point him to this, okay?