This computer (yes, computer!) costs $25

May 5, 2011 11:43 PM
Matthew Lynley
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MobileBeat 2013
July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA
Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Game developer David Braben has created a computer that’s about the size of a flash drive — and it’ll most likely cost less than your last date.

Braben designed the device with the goal of having an extremely affordable computer that children across the world can access. It’s a similar goal the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project had — create an extremely affordable computer that children in both developing countries and first-world countries can get their hands on.

The device sports a version of Linux, an open-sourced operating system that has become increasingly popular in philanthropic causes like this because it’s free to install and distribute. It will likely ship with some variation of Ubuntu, a very popular Linux distribution that has a huge development community, according to tech news site Geek.com.

“In theory, they could be given away to the child. There would be other ways of funding it,” Braben said in an interview with BBC. “They would be able to engage with a lot of things that we are all consumers of but not necessarily creators of — understanding how you put together little scripts that might run on websites and filters.”

The device has a 700-megahertz ARM processor and 128 megabytes of RAM. To put that in perspective, that’s about half as much memory as most smartphones today, which also sport processors that usually clock in at around 1 gigahertz. So it’s slightly weaker than a smartphone. There’s an SD card slot on the device that handles any storage, and it can output video and other images at 1080p resolution. It has a USB-out port that lets owners plug in a keyboard and an HDMI-out port that can connect to an HDMI-enabled television or monitor.

Braben said he hopes the device will be available to the public in around a year. Based on the components, the device will cost somewhere between £10 and £15, or around $25. It will be distributed through a charitable organization called the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote computer science in schools.

  • http://assortiment.kiev.ua PC Service Man

    twenty five backs!?!?!? I wanna it!

  • Erich Sparks

    HDMI out? If they can't afford a $25 computer how are they going to afford a $100+ monitor? One tv per town? I thought the point of laptops was because a lot of villages didn't have reliable power?

  • http://twitter.com/cthorm Casey Thormahlen

    You would be surprised how many low income households in undeveloped countries have nice new TVs. It regularly takes precedence over indoor plumbing. I have a friend working for a non profit with indigenous people in rural Panama and even they have a flat screen TV.

  • http://www.ashleypearson.net Ashley Pearson

    This is quite cool. Hard to get it to everyone that needs it though!

  • http://profiles.google.com/tje210 Charles Kulcsar

    Where does it get its power from? In another (better) picture, i only saw 2 USB ports which i presume are outputs… then another set of wires which i assume were for video out… and that's all. I would TOTALLY be all about this if I could see a power conection somewhere.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Simon-Yu/100000989859895 Simon Yu

    This article is quite wrong about the smartphone specs, I mean sure the 700Mhz is a little under what the average smartphone is (Mainly the Android majority of smartphones now available) but clockspeed isn't everything, it does depend on the architecture so if it's something like a 700Mhz ARM11 this thing is going to be pretty slow if it were a underclocked 2nd Generation Snapdragon processor (Still ARM based) it'd be quite fast for only 700Mhz, but my guess is it's an 11 or something which it notoriously slow.. it's about the cheapness not the true productivity of the computer. Also.. the RAM is about a quarter of what average Smartphones have now.. this includes Android phones.. the average on the smartphone is 512mb, with new superphones clocking in at 768mb-1gb of ram to handle those dual-core processors and application processes.

  • wiliamsmith4444

    I have a mate working for a non profit with indigenous people in rural Panama and even they have a flat screen TV. Auto Auctions

  • ZugWoo

    Wow, you have to admit that is pretty amazing. Wow. http://www.totally-anon.at.tc

  • http://profiles.google.com/spikescm Spike S

    This has implications far beyond OLPC. If this were available today I would readily order 1,000 for my factory for data logging and automation upgrades. Mr. Braben needs to focus on the commercial possibilities for this device to see the light of day. Many companies would gladly pay 50,000 to tool the boards to stamp these out if they could have it next month. A year from now technology will already have made this device obsolete.

  • http://openid-provider.appspot.com/collection60@googlemail.com Collection60

    Pretty cool. I just wish Linux didn't suck so much. But there's no way you could run OSX or MSWindows on this so Linux is the best OS for this.

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/zogati#about HiBabyWhatsYourName

    how long before this will be available at Amazon??

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