The “Magalhães” is a new laptop the Portuguese government has been advertising lately. They say it’s an amazing piece of technology, “fully built in Portugal” and with a lot of potential. In fact, it has been said it’s a tool for the primary school students of this country. I am absolutely sure that the 7” or 9” screen will make the delights of the children. And of course, what good is such a nice monitor without a nice set of hardware behind it? With an Intel Celeron-M 900Mhz processor and between 512Mb and 1Gb of ram, it sure will run smoothly and be very efficient. Not to mention the graphics card, or the amazing 30Gb hard drive that is more space than anyone ever needed. Actually, I think they made a mistake there. They should have gone with a 20Gb disk since that’s clearly overkill in comparison with the rest of the system.
Oh but here are the good news: It’s only €50 for primary school students or around €300 for the general public. What a bargain! But oh no! In fact, the buyers are proposed (read, “made believe they want”) a 36 months contract with one of the portable Internet operators in Portugal (vodafone, TMN or Optimus) which raises the price to several hundred Euros. “But oh no, it’s not mandatory”, say the people whose interest is that as many families as possible buy the thing. “But it would really help if your kid had it”. What an hypocrisy! And the problem here is that the people buying it are doing so blinded by some faith in the government’s words and the promise that “it’s good for your kids’ education”. Apparently, the ones who needs to be educated here is a certain set of people who think they out-smart everyone else. But this kind of education is not going with laptops, no. A good old beating, on the most pure fashion of traditional education is what’s needed.
Worst even, the laptop only has a 24 months warranty, so if (read when) the thing breaks down after the 24 month period, the parents will be paying an Internet contract they can’t use and the kid will have no computer (though, nothing or this is basically the same thing).
But if you think that’s bad, just wait a minute because it gets worst. The laptop is actually a product Intel has on the market since 2006 for the third-world countries (which we are, apparently) called “Classmate” which you can buy here (thought I certainly don’t recommend you to). All JP Sá Couto, the company distributing the laptops, does is assemble them, and badly I may add. The idea is not Portuguese, the concept is not Portuguese, the design is not Portuguese. No, the only Portuguese product in this scam (yes ladies and gentlemen, it certainly looks like a scam) is the dishonesty of the government and of a few people who take advantage of the general population’s belief in said establishment to make a few (million) bucks.

~Gustavo