Last week MIT MediaLab’s Nicholas Negroponte and representatives of the technology providers for the One Laptop Per Child Foundation updated us on the status of this landmark project “to ensure that every school-aged child in the lesser-developed parts of the world owns their own personal laptop that they can use to learn and to learn about learning.”

When we first saw the US$175 green-and-white clamshell, we thought VTech and Speak-and-Spell. However, looks are deceiving. The rugged plastic housing is water-tight and includes 2 antennas to hook into a mesh wifi network. The high-resolution screen is remarkably legible in sunlight. The OLPC unit’s AMD processor runs Red Hat Linux and a portfolio of expected applications — browser, productivity tools, photo, plus a bunch of educational programs oriented toward kids.

We linked to some of our favorite websites right away, using the OLPC editor to open a Word file on our Windows Small Business Server and then to start this blog entry on our Linux site server. The next step was to check our RSS feeds where we learned out about and visited AOL’s new site in India. The verdict: This is a fully functional laptop computer that duplicated the everyday functions of our MacBook in about half the footprint and 10% of the cost.

How could OLPC do that? By defining its design center and sticking to it, the Foundation created what really is a new category of laptops. Small, no bloat, easy to use. As a non-profit organization dealing only with governments, the OLPC convinced technology providers and laptop builder Quanta that the volumes would be there for necessary economies of scale. Everyone took minimal or no profit and pushed their suppliers for lower prices. Incidentally, OLPC feels that its laptop has already changed the market — in response to this pricing, Microsoft includes Windows XP Starter in a Student Innovation Suite for US$3 to governments purchasing in bulk (so don’t look for that price at Best Buy).

Negroponte told us he had hosted representatives of 25 countries the week of our visit — 8 of those early participants in the program are considered “family” (Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay). So we asked about localization. Linux is already internationalized. At launch the OLPC laptops will support 11 keyboards and at least 6 alphabets. The project relies on pro bono localization by a huge army of volunteers. The CTO told us us that everything is being developed and written with localization in mind. The Foundation’s website has been translated into 25+ languages and its Wiki is available in a variety of languages. Looking forward to the long tail of less commonly spoken languages, OLPC said it will follow the same path and rely on volunteers for localization.

Where can you buy one? Unless you’re a government, forget about it. The OLPC offers this inexpensive laptop to national governments willing to buy hundreds of thousands of units. Citibank provides letters of credits so that the deals can close quickly and suppliers get paid within days. Negroponte said that the Foundation is closing in on its build commitment of 3 million laptops by the end of May. If that happens, Quanta will be on track toward building 400,000 units a month late this year. The Foundation gets at least a request per week from device manufacturers asking about licensing the technology, but that’s outside the scope of what OLPC wants to accomplish. But if the royalties from small device builders are high enough, we are sure that sooner or later the OLPC will license the technology so it can subsidize more laptops for more children.