Computers in developing regions

This was a long time ago so I'll start my story, once upon a time in the depths of Redmond. There was some discussion on the 'LDS at Microsoft' public folder about an idea or initiative to create Windows Mobile based membership and financial clerk applications for deployment on devices like the HP Jornada 780 and NEC MobilePro series sub-notebooks. The idea was to issue out these systems to units in developing parts of the world. It sounded like a really great idea at the time. (I was working on either Host Integration Server or in ITG at the time.) Has anyone else ever heard of this and what happened to the idea?

I'm only guessing but I would suppose that with the drastic drop in hardware prices, it has become less important to put mobile devices in remote parts of the world than it is to put full PC's. You can get a decent PC for 500 dollars where and a good mobile device is about the same price but with less functionality.

Tom

Plus you now have those $100 laptops which can run software just the same as a regular PC so all those programs don't have to be ported over to a new platform... well they do have to run on Linux but most of those programs mentioned are now written in Java anyway.