This week has been rife with rumors about an extremely cheap laptop being constructed in India. Initial reports talked about a machine that was perhaps $20 or even $10 to manufacture, aimed at children as an educational tool. More rumors said it was to be an “answer” to the OLPC’s XO laptop, one of the most famous ultra-cheap devices available today. But to no one’s surprise, it turned out too good to be true, and won't be anywhere near what a “laptop” would be. The device will actually be a simple storage device. It's estimated to store up to about 2GB of data and has wireless functionality, making it not much more than a thumb drive with Wi-Fi.

That's not to say a $10 price tag isn't impressive in and of itself. There's hardly anything in the computer world you can buy for that price, and any endeavor to make electronics cheaper is a good one. In this particular case, media hype brought this device to inflated status very quickly. Aside from that, it's aimed exclusively at the educational sector in India, and at the most will be augmenting, not replacing, devices like the XO laptop.