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More on $100 Laptops

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 6 months ago

May 1, 2008

 

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XO Laptop: Child's Play

One Laptop Per Child product deemed basic but useful, as initiative to spread affordable technology.

Ben Ames, IDG News Service
Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:00 PM PDT
 

The hardest thing about learning to use the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project's XO notebook PC is finding the right way to twist its antenna ears and open the display. Once you can see the screen, just follow the icons to write a note, snap a photo or compose a tune.

OLPC invited analysts and reporters to play with the B2 version of its computers during a press conference at their Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices last week. The group plans to begin mass production in September despite announcing they will now charge $175 for each of what had been the ballyhooed "hundred-dollar laptops."

That price is still far below the $500 price tag on the most basic commercial notebook in U.S. retail shops, a discount that OLPC hopes will allow developing nations to buy XO laptops in mass quantities and supply them to rural school children.

 

Simplified Computing

With its curved surfaces, bright green plastic shell and puppy-ear WiFi antennas, the physical design of the XO is easy to carry. OLPC President Walter Bender held his 3-pound XO aloft as he spoke to reporters, his fingers wrapped around the laptop's integrated suitcase-type handle.

Even generating electricity for this laptop feels like a game. OLPC designers have cut out the iconic hand-crank that was attached to the side of earlier versions like the engine starter on a Model T Ford. But they still offer that charger mounted on a USB cable as an optional accessory for users without access to reliable electrical sockets. Other power choices include a pull-cord that delivers an hour of use for 6 minutes of pulling, a foot pedal, a car battery adapter and a solar panel the size of a cafeteria tray.

In addition to finding creative power sources, OLPC designers have traded computing speed for lower cost and longer battery life. Instead of Microsoft Windows Vista they use Red Hat's Fedora Linux; instead of an 80GB hard drive they use a 1GB NAND flash drive; and instead of a 3GHz dual-core processor, the B2 XO uses a 400MHz Geode GX 533 from Advanced Micro Devices.

 

Intro to Apps

 

In practice, the Geode chip provides plenty of power to launch applications like paint, calculator and newsreader RSS feeds.

A user can click on the drum-shaped icon, launching the TamTam music composition program and producing a symphony of duck quacks, infant giggles and car horns. Once the laughter stops, he can click on the camera icon, and snap photos and videos by pointing the laptop at subjects. A mosaic-shaped icon starts a quick game of Tetris, and the laptop screen be rotated and used as a tablet for reading an illustrated children's book written in Farsi.

However, with all those applications running at once, the XO can begin to respond sluggishly. The experience can be disorienting for a user accustomed to the speed of a business notebook, but a quick reboot returns the XO to its original state. Future versions may perform better, since OLPC will use a faster, 433MHz Geode LX 700 in the B2-2 and future versions.

Instead of the hierarchical drop-down menus familiar to Windows users, the Sugar interface on the XO lists applications as icons on the screen, arrayed like numbers around a clock face. And a grown man could find it difficult to type a 500-word story on the cramped keys. The keyboard keys are very close together -- rendered on the XO, that sentence came out as "the keybosrd keysare very clsetogether."

 

Promote Communication

 

OLPC replies to that criticism by pointing out that the XO is not designed for modern office use, but for three universal traits that every kid has in common: learning, socializing and creating, Bender said.

That is why the XO's desktop page shows a graphic map of WiFi signals up to 2 kilometers away, allowing all the XO laptops in a village to share drawings, notes, photographs, and musical compositions. The mesh of laptops could also share a single Internet connection, allowing them to use a distant ISP or a single schoolhouse server.

 

U.S. schools may join inexpensive-laptop project

 

By Reuters

http://news.com.com/U.S.+schools+may+join+inexpensive-laptop+project/2100-1041_3-6179766.html

 

Story last modified Mon Apr 30 04:50:52 PDT 2007

 

 

A project that aims to deliver low-priced laptops to the world's poorest children may have a new market: U.S. schools.

The nonprofit One Laptop per Child project said on Thursday it might sell versions of its kid-friendly laptops in the United States, reversing its previous position of distributing them to only the poorest nations.

"We can't ignore the United States. ... We are looking at it very seriously," Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who founded the project, told analysts and reporters.

Once known as the $100 laptop, the lime-green-and-white devices are inching up in price. In February, the project estimated said they would sell for $150 each. Negroponte now puts their price tag at $176 apiece. He also noted this week that the machines, which run Linux, also will be configured to run Windows as well (a fact likely to severely disappoint the open-source community).

The machines would go at a higher price to U.S. schools, he said, because more resources are invested in American education than in developing nations, even in the poorest U.S. regions.

The laptop features a string pulley to charge its battery, a keyboard that switches between languages, a digital video camera, wireless connectivity and Linux open-source operating software tailored for remote regions.

 

The display switches from color to black-and-white for viewing in direct sunlight--a feature unavailable in laptops at least 10 times more expensive.

It requires just two watts of power compared to the typical laptop's 30 to 40 watts, and does away with hard drives, relying instead on flash memory and four USB ports to add memory devices. A minute of yanking on its pulley generates 10 minutes of electricity.

 

Weighing financial priorities

Negroponte said U.S. schools could receive the laptops by the end of the year in response to interest from 19 governors.

Stephen O'Grady, a software analyst with RedMonk, said millions of the devices, which are built by Taiwan's Quanta Computer, could be sold in the United States.

"There are still lots of underprivileged kids here who don't have access. So there is definitely a market for a very low-priced machine," he said.

Although many applaud the project's attempt to bridge the world's digital divide, some predict it will be a financial burden on countries that can least afford it with no guarantee of success.

Others say the money would be better spent on food, medicine, libraries and schools.

 

Wayan Vota, whose blog monitors the project, estimates the cost of providing one laptop per every Nigerian child equals 73 percent of the African country's entire government budget.

 

 

 

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