Nowadays, laptops are cheap as chips, in fact PC World and the Carphone Warehouse have been known to dish them out for free as long as you sign up for a mobile broadband contract. However, those of you that don't wish to have that kind of contract, you could instead opt for this buy this notebook for Elonex and get change from £100. 

The "One" laptop is about to launched at the at the Education Show 2008 at the Birmingham NEC at the end of the month. The lappy promises the usual, but obviously stripped down a bit. It comes with Wi-Fi access and 1GB of memory but the USB port can be used to insert additional memory. For an additional £20 you can upgrade to 2GB of memory and Bluetooth.

The laptop has a rubber keyboard (calm down you Sinclair enthusiasts!) and a detachable seven-inch screen. There is also a trackpad at the back of the screen so the laptop can be used as a tablet PC.

Sam Goult, Marketing Manager at Elonex, said "This pioneering technology has been developed to help nurture our children's education, to integrate them into the modern digital world that we all now belong to. The ONE removes the cost barrier that has prevented the one-laptop-per-person, large-scale uptake of computers in the education system that has for so long been just a pipe-dream. Investment in digital technology is paramount to help the next generation achieve their full potential."

Of course, it runs on Linux and has a whole host of open-source software to do your word processing, spreadsheets and the like. It has graphics and imagingapplications as well as a media server, so you can play your mp3s wirelessly if you so wish.

Weighing less than a kilo, the laptop should run for three hours without mains and the flash-based hard drive should see it last a lot longer in the hands of a small child than your ordinary laptops.

Maybe there should hand these out to defence staff.

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