STEPHEN FRY

I'd hesitate to describe a device like this as "innovative but useless, until someone sees a use". The uses already exist: attach a keyboard and screen and you've got a linux PC; hook a load together and you're on the way to a supercomputer (q.v. the PS2 cluster described here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster - imagine how useful that would be for a third world university). As Nitro says, this will make computer technology accessible to people who otherwise wouldn't stand a chance of affording it, and you've got to wonder how many Turings and Stallmans are out there, living in poor countries and just waiting for something like this.

One thing a device like this might create as a kind of side discourse, hopefully, is how people 'in the West' think of tech vs those outside of 'the West'. Let's just say 'impoverished' if it's easier to understand.

For example, most of the people who actually build iPads cannot afford to buy them themselves. This is not our experience and so we tend to be in a minor state of disbelief that it could occur in our tech-modern times, but it does.

And as Silvermute so very deftly pointed out, there may be, and I'd wager there ARE, extremely bright, innovative minds in impoverished countries who, while they can't afford to attend some far away university because they don't have cars even and can't afford a netbook to explore the w.w.w with like we all take for granted, a tiny device such as the one starting this thread has REAL potential to benefit these folks.

And I'd go a step further and suggest it really doesn't matter if the people in impoverished countries have ten Einsteins or Curie's or Wilde's waiting to bloom; what does matter is that the internets is lacking very much in the input of peoples experiences and perspectives in these countries. For example, a mother of five in a poor country probably has plenty of things to say and it's indeterminate to know who that might matter to. What matters, imo, is that her voice and people in Tibet and Haiti etc all have a chance to participate.

A box full of such devices with donated keyboards and monitors has the potential to teach somebody to fish. And the suspicious side of me wonders if the lack has more to do with a kind of intellctual/cultural bigotry about who is 'worthy' of having access to cheap tech. People that think nothing of spending $500 on a new iPhone package seem astounded that there are still people who would have to work five years to make $500 and given a choice between food and an iPhone, the iPhone loses.

Anyway, this creates another problem where tech is abandoned very quickly in favor of the next gen, causes a lack of backwards compatibility that is very rarely logically rationalized. Often it's totally unecessary to do. My problem with many smartphones though is one more of security. If you cannot remove the battery on your own phone, you cannot control wether it is used as a geolocation device. But tracking's another topic.

I'd love to see more public faces get behind devices like this as a humanitarian cause. Purchase a 1,000 of 'em and co-ordinate donated keyboards and monitors, call a press conference so everyone knows how wonderful this face and idea is, and give them to some community. It doesn't have to be more complex than that.