AMD"s Personal Internet Communicator, or PIC, is set to go on sale at Radio Shack outlets in the US beginning this Sunday at a price of $299. Aimed at low income areas around the world, the PIC is part of AMD CEO Hector Ruiz"s 50-15 plan, which hopes to get 50 percent of the worlds population connected to the internet by 2015. Already available in other parts of the world, the PIC a basic, no-frills machine that consists of a 366MHz Geode GX processor, 10GB HDD, and internal modem, all running Windows CE 5.0.
The PIC has already been released in places such as Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean and India and will soon be available in China and Russia. In many cases, telephone companies lease the machines to their customers on a monthly basis. AMD estimates that about 3.8 billion people in the world currently can"t afford a standard personal computer.