Yves Béhar - One Laptop Per Child

For the last two years, Yves Béhar (Fuse Project) has been working with Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop Per Child - OLPC), director of the MIT Media Lab, developing a laptop that will be sold exclusively to governments in the developing world for $100 and then given to school children. Not only have they achieved a miracle of costing, their laptop makes all existing models look lazy, cumbersome and stupid. via Wallpaper

The goal of the XO is simple and noble: to give every child a laptop, especially in developing countries, where the machines will be sold in bulk for about $130 apiece.
But the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit, formed at MIT, didn’t just create a cheap computer. In addition to cutting costs—by designing lower-priced circuitry and using an open-source operating system, among other things—it also improved on the standard laptop by slashing the machine’s energy use by 90 percent, ideal for a device that could be charged by hand-cranked power in rural villages. The biggest power hog is typically the display, so engineers invented a new LCD.
Each pixel has one part that reflects light and one that lets light pass through a colored filter. Turn on the LED behind the screen, and a full-color image appears as rays stream through the tinted filters. Turn it off to save power, and light bounces off the reflective parts of the pixels to form a black-and-white image perfect for e-mail or e-textbooks. Even more efficient, the CPU suspends itself when the image is static.

Expect the tech in full-price laptops in a few years.