Ars Technica reports Lenovo's Friday announcement of a family of desktop computers for 800 million rural Chinese. Starting at $199 it will include everything but the monitor. Distributed through 5,000 dealers. Unknowns:

• operating systems (Vista? Linux?)
• application suite (MS Works? Office? OpenOffice? other?)
• connectivity (ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, other?)
• messengers (QQ? Microsoft? Yahoo!? Skype? Pidgin/Jabber client?)

I'm really hoping Skype's China teams are on this, knocking on Lenovo's door. 

See also:

• AP newswire story.
• Bill Belew: "The winners will be the 800 million Chinese out in the boonies. Next up...who's going to bring Internet access to the countryside?"
• Gizmodo: "This on the whole is an excellent development, bringing more people into the technological revolution is a noble effort, even if the intent is fiscally orientated."
• HotHardware: "Yeah but will it play Crysis at 1024X768 with 4X AA?"
• Google Finance: (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY)