Rs. 5000 (= $100) PC together with mobile internet phones?

During the recent World Economic Forum, Negroponte's announcement (see this RedHerring article, for example) regarding the $100 PC made a lot of headlines. There are, of course, many others who are working towards this goal -- e.g. Bangalore-based Simputer. There are others who believe that ownership of PCs is not critical -- availability of services at reasonable cost will drive the internet and computing usage up in developing countries like India. Netcore and it's founder Rajesh Jain have been pursuing this line of thought.

An eWeek article (if one can wade through the quaint (in a offensive way) writing style that can easily put one off) presents a suggestion that sounds the technical counterpart of the RISC model developed by Atanu Dey and the PURA concept being promoted by President A P J Abdul Kalam. (Here's a link to Atanu's blog entry with brief history of RISC and one-line "comparison" with PURA.)

Here's a quote from the article:

One machine per home may be a rich boy's dream. One machine per village, however, with mobile-phone peripheral access, is another matter. You can work out a power budget for 100 people with a solar collector or a wind generator and a battery that would keep a mini-ITX system running 24-7 all year, and that would power a micro-cell for mobile phones that would conference all local farmers into a community network.

The article points out that the "total cost of ownership" is more important.

And there are other costs. The $100 price point isn't the point! The things that matter are the installation costs, the running costs and the power budget. As Wenchi Chen said, if you give someone a free PC and then ask them to pay $25 a month for a broadband feed, they won't be able to use it. "It wouldn't be a valuable resource—and also, if they can't afford the power budget, it won't be a valuable resource."

The village server is a concept with a future, especially if it's a wireless village server. But to work, it has to have virtually free access to the Internet, and very cheap access to the phone network.

Actually, we need to throw in the cost of the useful software and relevant content (and the opportunity cost related to the absence of useful software/content).

In any case, this sounds interesting to me. Why not complement the computing services provided by the RISC model with mobile phones with internet connectivity (at a reasonable cost!) and appropriate suite of data services? This will increase the convenience for the users. Further, it will help personalize the services. The shared facilities is still an important concept -- the shared infrastructure (such as printers, for example) can still be used on-demand by the people who need those services.