Red Herring recently had a small news item on how laptops are increasingly getting rugged for benefitting the “mobile” user, and constantly the costs are shooting through the roof for these hi-tech gadgets.

In the same breath, MIT Media Lab’s Negroponte has recently unveiled plans for, hold your breath, a “rugged” $100 Laptop (HDL) which he wants to see in the hand of every child across the world..Of-course, it still is in the development phase and is likely to hit production, if it ever, by end 2006. While sceptics will always frown at any such outlandish initiatives, Personally, I believe, this is something that can probably touch far more lives than the Simputer, which unlike the HDL is targetted at individuals. Negroponte wants these HDLs to be distributed directly by Education ministries across the world–A more likely way of getting the economies of scale factor right. Like Tech-Review’s Jason points out in his August ‘05 editorial, at the end it might take a lot more other factors like low-cost internet, community p2p networks, and most importantly, power to run these machines than just getting the economies of scale right.