Intel signs up vendors for Classmate PC in India

The Classmate PC will be sold only to schools, and not through retail channels to consumers, John McClure, Intel's director for marketing in South Asia said on Monday. The Classmate PC has been specially designed to work in a networked classroom environment, and comes with software and features that give the teacher in the classroom control over the dissemination of content to students' PCs, he said.

The Classmate PC, for example, does not have a hard disk. Instead it contains up to 2G-bytes of NAND flash memory. Most of the content will reside on the teacher's PC, McClure said.

Intel's manufacturering partners, such as HCL, Wipro and Zenith, will team with content providers, education services providers, and system integrators to deploy the Classmate PCs in schools.

The PC, which can run both Linux and Windows operating systems, is powered by a 900MHz Intel Celeron mobile processor, and comes with Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, Intel said. It has a 7-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen, and an option of 256 or 512M bytes of RAM, Intel said. The device weighs less than 1.45 kg and comes with a six-cell lithium-ion battery promising three to four hours use, the company said.

The introduction of the Classmate PC follows pilots of the product by Intel in some schools in the country.

The price of the product with the control software will be 18,000 Indian Rupees (US$450), with the education software and Wi-Fi connectivity available at extra cost.

That is a high price by Indian standards, prompting Intel to target the device in the first phase at private schools, rather than government-run schools that typically run on shoe-string budgets. While well-funded private schools may deploy the computers across the school, at some other private schools, it is more likely that the school will introduce the PCs initially in one class, such as the science class, according to McClure. In another rollout scenario, schools may deploy a few in each class, and assign each PC to a group of students, he said.

Intel expects some of its partners to offer schools the option to pay for the PCs on a monthly fee per student, McClure said.

The Classmate PC is also being rolled out in Nigeria and Brazil, McClure said.

Intel plans to introduce new models of the Classmate PC by the end of this year or early next year, targeted at higher education and professional schools like nursing schools, he said. These models may have some modifications in features, including large hard disk drives, to suit the usage models envisaged, McClure said.

Intel is not targeting the Classmate PCs at government-run schools in India, both because of their cost, and also because most of these schools are still behind in technology adoption. For these schools, Intel is donating about 10,000 PCs over the next three to five years, and is also training teachers on the use of computers. A number of Intel programs, including one called the Community PC, which offers a shared PC to local communities, aim to bridge the digital divide for this segment of the population, McClure said.

Intel announced earlier this month that it has joined the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The nonprofit project aims to equip children in developing countries with specially designed low-cost notebooks powered by chips from Intel's rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).

In India, however, the OLPC is a nonstarter with the Indian government deciding not to adopt it because it does not provide for control by teachers, among other reasons.