Negroponte's $100 Notebook to Cost $140

Negroponte, the chairman of the One Laptop per Child group, recently announced that the trial for the renowned $100 computer for children will start next month and the first countries to benefit from the project will be Nigeria and Thailand, informs Cnet.

Furthermore, the "B-Machines", as Negroponte named them, will enter mass production in November and will be "tested to destruction", as the professor said in an interview taken by Znet.

"In an e-mail sent to ZDNet UK, Negroponte said reports that trials would initially be limited to Thailand were inaccurate."Visual models and developer board demos" will be sent to Nigeria in September and to Thailand in October, for field trials. Nicholas Negroponte "Trials start everywhere at the same time," insisted Negroponte, adding that "some journalists have erred by writing about a single country's involvement and touting it as the first deployment," reports Cnet.

Up until now, the price of the PC has been known to be around $100, but Negroponte said in the interview that the countries will have to pay more if they want to benefit from the project - between $135 and $140 for each PC.

"It is a floating price. We are a non-profit organization. We have a target of $100 by 2008, but probably it will be $135, maybe $140. That is a start price, but what we have to do is with every release make it cheaper and cheaper. We are promising that the price will go down," Negroponte told attendees of the Red Hat Summit in Nashville in June.

At the end of last month, Brazil, Nigeria, Argentina and Thailand announced they have already signed contracts with One Laptop per Child Group for a million-unit shipment each, but Negroponte denies the closing of the deals: "We have not signed any agreements for orders, but we are in communication with the countries mentioned. OLPC has asked that all interested parties wait to see a working machine before placing their orders."