The One Laptop Per Child project hasn't hit its target price of $100, but already one of its creators is talking about a $75 device.

PC maker Cherrypal has done something Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child couldn't do: make a laptop that breaks the US$100 price barrier. It can run the Linux or Windows CE operating systems, which are also found on cell phones.

Acer, the world’s third largest computer seller, said today that it will offer a new, low-cost laptop targeted primarily at emerging markets. Little is known about the model aside from the fact that will have a 7- or 9-inch display, cost about $470, and ship sometime in the second or third quarter. The specs and price would put it in direct competition with other low-cost models such as the Asus Eee PC and the Everex CloudBook, and to a lesser extent OLPC’s XO laptop.

On 28 February 2008, Elonex launched the Elonex ONE—the first sub-£100 laptop in the UK. Clearly competing against the much in-demand Asus EeePC [2], Elonex say they are aiming at the school-student market. The thing is, I just can’t stop asking: isn’t £99 too cheap for a laptop?

European courts recently discovered that the Windows OS effectively doubled the purchase price of a laptop. Here's further proof!

Netbooks are a new category of laptop computer, defined mostly by their small size and cheap price. The category started only a year ago and has evolved drastically since. I tried the first netbook, an Asus Eee PC with a 7-inch screen and didn't like it; the keyboard and screen were much too small.

As component prices drop, the aggressive pricing of commercial Linux notebooks could hamper efforts by One Laptop Per Child to supply inexpensive laptops to children in developing markets.

As demonstrated by the current price for a Dell Inspiron Mini 9, netbook prices are falling very quickly and they started out cheap from the beginning. These price drops are largely driven by improvements in hardware that make the hardware components cheaper, rather than the software getting less expensive, though. This trend poses a problem for Microsoft...

Petite laptops with small screens and even tinier price tags may do more than shake up the computer hardware industry: They might loosen Microsoft's grip on the computer operating system.