Another cheap PC heard from -- sort of

Well, this explains the strangely nasty comments that Intel's Craig Barrett was making last December about the $100 hand-cranked PCs from Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative.  Back then, Barrett said the OLPC device  wasn't a laptop, but a gadget, and that what people in the third world need is a real PC, "not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power."

You'd almost think that $100 hand-cranked laptop was competing with something from Intel. Which, it turns out, it is, sort of.

According to this IDG News Service story, Intel's "Discover the PC" computer will run Linux or Windows XP Starter Edition,  have a hard drive, built-in networking, VGA video and the usual collection of ports (PS/2, USB, parallel) plus S-Video to connect to a TV, and run on a low-power CPU from -- who else? -- Intel, which didn't make the cut for the $100 laptop.

Of course, this being Intel, the new PCs don't yet have pricing set or even a manufacturer lined up. But they do have a customer, the Mexican phone company Telmex, which will start selling them to local governments around late summer, Intel says.

Is this really a competitor to the hand-cranked laptop? Probably not, at least not in a narrow sense. But it's nice to see Intel reacting to the potential loss of most of the world as a market -- and reacting not just with trash talk, but with the first draft of a PC that might actually have value to people who don't work in air-conditioned offices, and that'll actually be cheap enough for them to buy and use.

Now let's see if Intel's "Discover the" PC with its 2H '06 schedule will goose OLPC to speed up its "sometime in 2007" target for producing the hand-cranked laptop.