In the race to develop the first mass-producible laptop that costs less than $100 has apparently been won by Chinese company HiVision, which currently offers an adorable, pink, 7" MiniNote for $120 but plans to introduce a model in October that will retail for only $98. Like the Lemote laptop that radical open source guru Richard Stallman uses, it couldn't run Windows if you wanted it to. But it comes with a free installation of Xip, a Linux distribution from China, and runs Firefox. But then Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project decided to go with Windows and with that decision alone the size and cost ballooned. Would be just the thing for running Google's new Chrome browser — that is, if the Chrome browser supported Linux.

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