The idea of One Laptop for One Child, for every child, seems to be closer to reality now that anyone with 200 dollars USD can donate one to another child in a developing country or you can buy one for your child and another for developing country:  BTW, here's a review by David Pogue done about a month ago:

"…David Pogue is right about the OLPC in his NY Times column this week. For those of you who haven't kept up with the changes in the One Laptop Per Child he sums it up nicely, demoing all the engineering miracles in the machine, addressing the low minded complaints of "snarky bloggers" (Where?!), going on to explain why it's an interesting and important thing for the developing world. The video does a great job, so I'll recommend you watch the video above. It definitely convinced me: Even more so than water or malaria shots or food, kids in third world countries need this PC. (David, I'm kidding. Nice column this week.) [NYTimes]"

In One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) - A Most Illuminating Project, the writer things that "…Any person who believes that education provides solutions to many problems that have no easy answers should find this program compelling and worthy of as much attention possible to ensure it succeeds. Every child should have the opportunity to learn. Education is the only way to resolve the many complex problems the world faces, most notably, ignorance, as we progress further into the twenty-first century". 

The question for me is - will One laptop per child move education of children forward by bringing them into the Internet Age?

Here's the Buzz generated by One Laptop Per Child in the Blogosphere, according to Blogpulse:

Biggest spike to date was in late September when the first signs of real trouble began to emerge.  Also, Businessweek was calling the OLPC a failure in late September because it might be the wrong tool to provide children - they may need mobile phones or mobile devices far more than laptops.  But others, such as Fast Company, thought the effort to provide one laptop to every child was good one and not a failure.

And here's  the One Laptop for One Child, for every child offer:

"…Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time in North America. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home."

The idea of providing one laptop per child is moving closer to reality - but not so much due to the drastically lowering prices of hardware itself - some of that being better than the 200 laptop being sent to children via the donation.

There's now a Everex’s gPC: A $199 PC with a half-baked “Google” OS being sold at Walmart, according to Crunchgear, and it's a bit more powerful than the XC Laptop and at the same price.

"…Wal-mart just plotzed out the Everex Green gPC, a low-end machine with low-end specs running Ubuntu Linux and a version of Enlightenment that its creators called GOS. Some may say that this is the “Google PC” but it’s actually running a version of Linux specially tweaked to let you “launch” Google apps — still in the browser — from the task bar. The PC runs a 1.5GHz VIA C7 CPU and is already up on Wal-Mart’s homepage so W00T W00T. Eighty gigabytes of hard drive space and 512 MB memory really seal the deal. Seriously."

Now, I understand that Heroes star Hiro Nakamura was named the OLPC world ambassador to promote the One Laptop per Child to the rest of the developing world.

I watch Heroes and I think Hiro is a good fit for the Ambassadorship.

"….Heroes star Masi Oka, also known as "hey, that's the guy from Scrubs", has just been "chosen" to be the OLPC Global Ambassador. His qualifications? Being a huge nerd kid (he was on a cover of Time for genius kids because his friend's dad was the photographer), working as a nerd at ILM (even while shooting Heroes), and looking like a nerd—three qualifications we meet as well. "

The initial reports about One Laptop Per child are also below expectations according Federated Media - OLPC Doesn’t Reach Expe
ctations as covered in GearLive with a post on OLPC Doesn’t Reach Expectations in pricing or performance.

"…This is partially due to fewer orders for the plastic encased device than expected. Its 1.1 version software should become available December 7 but there is no exact date for the units themselves. Apparently what was to be worldwide distribution has been narrowed down to only Uruguay and Mongolia. It seems to us that there would be plenty of room for sales right here in the States, where many children are also without computers."

Actually, it's advertised at 299 USD for a laptop per child - but the price goes down as you buy more of them due to the production delays   which are to be expected in a large undertaking of this kind, to be honest.

OK, so who's looking for "one laptop for every child" or OLPC?  Microsoft AdCenter Labs Demographic Prediction Tool says the query "one laptop for every child" appeals more to males than females by 54% to 46% - between 35 to 49 years of age.

:0.54  :0.46

But the funny thing is the message of "one laptop per child" doesn't match the perception of people who visit the website http://www.laptopgiving.org/ who have almost the reversed predicted demographics:

  :0.43    :0.57

Females aged 25-34 old, who go to the website are more interested than males.  It may mean females are more responsive to the message than males - because females, and often more invested in children's welfare than males - by nature.

It may be that what we're really buying is an interface and an idea, not so much the laptop:

"….Beginning with Seymour Papert's simple observation that children are knowledge workers like any adult, only more so, we decided they needed a user-interface tailored to their specific type of knowledge work: learning. So, working together with teams from Pentagram and Red Hat, we created SUGAR, a “zoom” interface that graphically captures their world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing the connections within the community, among people, and their activities."

 So here's what I think - the One Laptop per Child is a good idea and it has spurred, indirectly, solutions, like the gPC that are actually better deals.  The problem is not going to be price so much as distribution and support.   And once we deal with the issues of putting everyone on the Web - we'll have the raise the bar again, and offer more - but is that such a bad thing?