One Laptop Per Child recently gave  computers to children in  Yirrkala Homeland Schools in East Arnhem Land.  Picture: Stephen Cooper Source: The Daily Telegraph

One Laptop Per Child's next computer will be based on chipmaker Marvell Technology Group's Moby tablet design.

Marvell announced a prototype of the device this year and said it costs about $US99.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, is optimistic his organisation will be able to keep the price under $US100 in part because Marvell plans to market its tablets widely to schools and health care institutions.

"We want to see the price drop, and volume is the key to that," Mr Negroponte said.

The new tablets will have at least one, and maybe two, video cameras.

They'll sport wi-fi connections to the internet, "multi-touch" screens and have enough power to play high-definition and 3D video.

Marvel hopes to make the screens 8.5 inches by 11 inches, the size of a standard sheet of paper. Unlike Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet, the device will also work with plug-in peripherals such as mice.

Negroponte said he eventually wants the tablets to run some version of the free Linux PC operating software.

But the first generation of the "XO 3.0" tablet will likely use Android, the mobile-device operating system from Google, or something similar.

Although his group, which is based in Cambridge, US, worked with Microsoft to get its Windows operating system running on the XO laptops, Mr Negroponte said the new tablets will not use Windows 7 because the software requires too much memory and computing power.

Mr Negroponte said he plans to unveil the tablet device at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in January.

The One Laptop Per Child project has its share of sceptics, who have questioned the possibility of manufacturing a laptop for $100 and the point of computers in countries that lack basic infrastructure.

The quirky green and white XO laptop sold by One Laptop Per Child to governments and organisations in countries such as Afghanistan and Uruguay wasn't destined for such a broad audience.

OLPC had to repeatedly scale back expectations for how many of the laptops it could produce, and it didn't get the price much below $US200, twice the price specified by the device's "$100 laptop" nickname.

In 2005, Mr Negroponte envisioned having built 100 million laptops in about two years.

Today, two million of the machines are in use.

The XO was also more expensive to produce than a tablet would be because of its many moving parts and features meant to withstand glaring sun, blowing sand and spotty access to electricity.

In some cases, OLPC had to change the XO's design by region.

For example, the physical keyboard had to be customised for students in countries that don't use a Latin alphabet. It would be less expensive to change the software behind touch-screen keyboards.

Marvell's co-founder, Weili Dai, said the company has also found ways to cut costs in the way it was designing the chips.