Bangalore, April 3 (IANS) World’s largest chip-maker Intel Corporation Thursday unveiled a new version of its classmate PC for global education market with a nine-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, 512 megabyte (MB) memory, a 30 gigabyte (GB) HDD (hard disk drive) storage and an integrated webcam. Showcasing the second-generation classmate PC on the second day of Intel Developer Forum (IDF) being held at Shanghai in China, Intel research director Andrew Chien told delegates that the portable computers termed ‘netbooks’ were built on rugged Internet-centric platform, with wireless capability, longer battery life, water-resistant keyboards and are more shock resistant.

“The new version has been designed to enable manufacturers to make netbooks suited for diverse education needs of parents, teachers and students. Though only five percent of the world’s children have access to a PC or Internet, education is the best field to test how new technology enhances life,” Andrew said.

The Intel-powered classmate PC supports Microsoft Windows XP and variants of the Linux operating environment. With pre-installed education software stack, the netbooks are ideal for classroom-learning environment. Software and content will be made available in eight languages.

“About 80 software and hardware vendors, content providers, educational services providers and local OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) are working with us to develop a new infrastructure that supports the classmate PC. We also plan to build the future classmate PCs with Atom processor, the energy-efficient, low-cost chip designed for small mobile computing devices,” Andrew affirmed.