Malaysia Netbook Project Results?

[brevoort]

The discussion elsewhere on this board about the Malaysia schools netbook edition of the OS has got me wondering.

How did the schools pilot project turn out? Were there any results worth reporting? Is any part of the project still underway?

The reason I ask is that I happened to be working in Indonesia with the national planning agency at the time of the pilot project and the education planners for Indonesia were quite excited about what they thought was going to happen in southeast Asia thanks to Symbian and Psion. I was unable at the time to find out anything about how things were going.


Rick Grant
Calgary Alberta
www.rickgrant.com

[daredevil]

May be someone can ask One Ed dot com which handle this project. Usually not much information is being disclosed when it involve big player like the govenment and MNC.

[MartinMaxwell]

>>>How did the schools pilot project turn out? Were there any results worth reporting? Is any part of the project still underway?<<<

As far as I know the project is abandoned and the One Ed company has disappeared.

I think the reasons for collapse were rather political than technical. As is commonplace in Malaysia, the prime contractor One Ed did not seem to have the know-how to successfully implement the project.

It strikes me as particularly odd that in this project the netBook was positioned solely as a Web-tablet. So no real content development was done on the netBook itself. There are quite a few Symbian OS developers around SE Asia, many of which I have worked with on project basis. I have not heard any one of them being contacted to do any development work for the Malaysian school project, which is puzzling. It's like sitting unaware on a gold mine. My company has done a lot of education material for enterprises using a combination of C++ and OPL in a framework we call dpLearn. With this it is possible to squeeze in a lot of content inside a 16 M RAM netBook. In fact we now use the same framework to do product presentations on the Nokia 9200 Series as well. I was surprised that similar ideas was not adopted in the Malaysian project, because it would have enabled students to use it off-line as well.

[psionic]

Yep, it was a bomb! Sad, but i ended getting one of their netbooks cheap.

Still sad as this could have been an incredible project. As it turned out, it crumbleb as soon as it started. What is sad is that support for Psion machines seems to be disappearing into thin air by the day.

Love this forum and I agree with everyone!

:cool: