Sure, research analysts at Gartner may say the mythical $100 laptop is at least 3 years away. But apparently the folks at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore never got the memo. Because IDG News reports that they’re developing a laptop that will be sold for just $100, (not $10 as earlier reports suggested)

Now let’s be clear, there are a lot of things we don’t know about this laptop. Will it be the size of a ping pong table and weigh 70 pounds? Maybe. But it will be cheap. You know, if it ever graduates from the vaporware stage.

It’s also not clear whether the PC will actually be worth just $10 or if the government will be dumping huge subsidies into the project to make the computer as affordable as possible. While India certainly has an up and coming economy, there are huge portions of the country that have little or no access to the internet. If these cheap computers use some sort of mesh networking feature like the one included in the OLPC XO Laptop, they could go a long way toward bridging the digital divide.

A few weeks ago, Dell CEO Michael Dell indicated that the company would be entering the low-cost ultraportable market sometime soonish. But there weren’t many details available regarding the actual device Dell would be putting out. That hasn’t really changed today. There still aren’t many details. But there may be a few.

Dell has announced plans to sell a low-cost notebook called the Dell 500 in India. No word on the screen size, weight, or processing power. But the Dell 500 is designed for educational markets, and will cost Rs 24,500 or about $600 US.

The computer will be available in Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux flavors, and will sport an 8-in-1 card reader and wireless connectivity. And that’s pretty much all we know about it. Whether this is the same model that Dell will eventually release in the US remains to be seen.

[via Engadget]