The billions of pixels spent in the last few days in feverish anticipation of the Indian government pulling off what was supposed to be a $10 laptop were spent for naught.

It’s not a laptop; it’s some sort of cockamamie 2GB UBS storage device whose price is more like $100 (the government confesses to – whoops – a typo) that’s being subsidized at $20-$30, and might make $10 with mass production’s economies of scale in six months or so after the thing, the product of three year’s work, is more refined.

It was reportedly unveiled – at a temple, or at least a temple town, so maybe India’s Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), evidently the responsible party, was hoping for a water-into-wine-style miracle – as some sort of ill-explained and perhaps ill-conceived electronic textbook that would require a computer to access.

The Times of India quotes a pained research scholar from Mahila University as saying after the event, “The entire world was watching. This act of MHRD has shamed the nation.”

The paper said the Ministry’s Joint Secretary NK Sinha “refused to comment as to why it was being projected as a laptop when it was not.”

Gizmodo blames the fiasco on “deliberate misinformation by people close to the project, the complete and utter incompetence of the Indian tech press…and the condescending eagerness of Western news outlets to believe that such a product, which would have been dismissed as totally impossible if announced here, was inexplicably plausible because it was coming from the mysterious foreign land of India.”

That’s not to say there wasn’t any skepticism ahead of the announcement.

A local blog wrote of the sight-unseen device, “If the government could pull off a near-impossible technological miracle, does it not imply that the entire global computer industry is either totally incompetent, or else it is a huge scam which produces stuff at very little cost and sells them at exorbitant prices.”

And Ars Technical ultimately concluded that the only way the purported laptop could come in for 10 bucks is if it’s “really an abacus that connects to the Internet with the time-honored paper-cups-attached-with-string protocol.”

• India to Unveil $10 Laptop