Have you heard of One Laptop Per Child, the program that is trying to put a inexpensive laptop in the hands children in developing countries? Well, what do you think about the same type of program but instead of laptops you give children BlackBerrys? Paul lamb feels that the One Laptop Per Child effort may be too late and believes that One BlackBerry Per Child may be the way to go.
The developing world has been swept up in the mobile voice revolution, which has far outpaced the spread of desktop and laptop computers. Global mobile phone users number nearly 3 billion, and 1.3 billion of those users are able to access the Internet using their handheld devices. That compares with roughly 1.1 billion desktop users with Web access worldwide.
A cheap phone with Web access and locally relevant applications may be a better driver for bringing the developing world online. Phones are much simpler to use, allow people to leverage voice as a preferred means of communication and are certainly easier and safer to carry.
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Giving the BlackBerrys away for free is great. Who is going to pay for the Access?
A better device would be a smartphone with an open source operating system and much better software than a BB. As a computing platform, BB is a dog.
If Apple says… One iPhone Per Child… it will be more fascinating.