XO Laptop

"Strange, hard to open, but full of surprises" -- was my [WB's] initial reaction to the famous XO $100 Laptop from MIT that actually costs about $430 for two. So I guess it is really a $215 laptop. I had a chance to test a beta version briefly during last month's (Nov 07) Dust or Magic Institute. Important to note up front: the XO computer will not be available in the US or Canada; the only way to get one is through the buy-one, send-one to a poor child initiative.

The small, green clamshell case houses a 433 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM and wireless Internet, that we could not get to work. There's also a 7.5 inch color screen, a non-standard rubbery membrane keyboard that is almost toy-like, but can be easily imprinted with different languages (currently available in Thai, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, West African, Urdu, Mongolian, Cyrillic, Amharic; with others planned). The screen flips around, in Tablet PC fashion, making it into a book reader, minus the touch abilities. There is no hard drive or fan, and there are three USB ports as well as an SD card slot.

After struggling for about five minutes to get the case open, I tried the drawing program, that you access by moving the cursor down to the corner of screen, which causes a listing of the available applications to appear from the sides, somewhat comparable to Mac OSX. There's a strangely large touch pad with multiple parts, one for touch and the other for writing. We found the drawing experience to be refreshingly non-gimmicky although obviously difficult using the touch pad. There's just clean, pixel-by-pixel drawing, with the ability to easily import digital photos from the onboard camera. It is easy to see that this device is powerful and holds a lot of potential for expanding Internet access to remote areas of the world, which might include parts of your own hometown. In addition, the open-source aspect of the operating language is extremely promising, and based on the traffic show at the development wiki (http://dev.laptop.org/) it is clear that programmers around the world are working on the operating system, called "Sugar."

Unfortunately, we weren't able to explore, and that's about all we could get out of this computer before the batteries died. On paper, the specs are interesting -- because each computer has a wireless router, this makes it possible for each computer to create its own mesh network, right out of the box. So a child can send notes or sketches to another child in the same room; and if one of the computers is online, everyone can get online. Clearly there's some powerful thinking behind this computer, although we were not able to get any of these features working to personally test. Keep in mind that there's no disk drive, and you won't be able to install Windows or Mac-based software on this computer. Instead, this computer uses the Internet as it's hard drive; not a bad idea.

Entry date: 11/29/2007