Cherrypal Releases “Africa”, $99 Notebook

The search for ultra-affordable yet competent notebooks has been on-going for years, and as time passes, we continue to see numerous potential models. Some of these do indeed hit the market, such as the OLPC and Classmate, while some are still works-in-progress. But even as these new notebooks get released, there never seems to be a lack of complaint, and people want to see more, for even less.

It was with surprise to the entire industry the other day when a company called Cherrypal released a 7″ notebook that costs only $99, called the “Africa”. According to Cherrypal, it’s “small, slow, sufficient“, so there’s no secret behind the fact that it’s going to be slow, but again, you’d expect nothing else. A slow PC is a lot better than no PC, after all, especially if you’re a young child in a developing country who’s never had the chance to even use one before.

The Africa might be one small notebook, but it still has a little bit of weight to it, at 2.64lbs (this is obviously light compared to most other notebook models, however). It features a 7″ 800×600 display, and is measured at 213.5mm x 141.8 mm x 30.8 mm. It features a 400MHz XBurst processor by a Chinese company called Ingenic Semiconductor. Little is known about the chip, but it’s rumored to be based on the ARM core.

Other specs include 2GB NAND flash and 256MB of memory, along with three USB ports, a memory card reader and 86-key keyboard. Overall, it’s small, and simple, but for $99, it’s quite a feat as far as I’m concerned. It runs either Windows CE or Linux, and it’s available for order now, should you want one. Cherrypal also offers another small notebook, the “Bing” (no relation to Microsoft’s search engine) that has beefier specs, and a $389 price tag.

“We buy access inventory and package it up; that’s why we are able to offer such a low price,” Seybold said. “In other words, we use XBurst and similar inexpensive processors in order to stay below the $100 mark, we reserve the right to make changes on the fly, that’s why we didn’t go into great detail on our site. There are a number of customers who will get a much more powerful system than advertised. Yes we take orders and we started shipping last week. Naturally our margin on the “Africa” is very thin but we are not losing money either.”