Nicholas Negroponte has unveiled a good-looking design for the next-generation cheapo notebook from the One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to bring IT to poorer people. The OLPC project has been riven with squabbles and the first-generation XO design has had a less-than-enthusiastic reception in some of the countries to which it has been aimed.

The XO2 has two hinged screens that open up like a book, which has been done before, but Negroponte gives the idea a novel twist by allowing one of the screens to double as a soft keyboard, so that the machine could be used as a standard notebook.

He plans a selling prince of just $75 but as the first  XO never hit its target price of $100, the figure should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

The machine will run XP, Microsoft presumably having taken note of the fact that the emerging generation of low-cost mobiles could push Linux into the mainstream. Negroponte bases his price on the fact that LCD screen price have dropped since their use in DVD players.

The screens will be made by a company called Pixel QI and there will be no motherboard; instead the circuitry will be integrated into the screen in much the same way as the active-matrix backplane is today. The Pixel QI site says it is working on touch capability that will cost $5 to $10 per screen.

Negroponte gets a lot of flak but these devices do have the potential to deliver text books and other learning materials in countries where they are very thin on the ground. He foresees the X02 being used initially as an eBook reader.