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Comparing the OLPC, Classmate and Eee
ZDOne writes "Small and inexpensive notebooks have been a hot topic in recent months as the Classmate, XO laptop, and the Asus Eee go head-to-head with each other for the low end/educational market. ZDNet has a look at all three systems, comparing the three platforms on multiple points of data to determine which of the three fits your needs. 'In terms of overall stylishness the Eee is the winner, but the XO and the Classmate are both more rounded and rugged, and come with carrying handles. The OLPC XO has the biggest screen, an innovative 7.5in. dual-mode transmissive/reflective LCD that can swivel from traditional clamshell mode to 'e-book' mode with the screen facing outwards, tablet-style (although it's not a touch-screen). The Classmate and Eee both have similar, rather cramped, 7in. TFT displays. '"
Lately I've been entertaining the idea of moving to somewhere in the developing world where all the kids have XOs, and teaching them to code.
I've seen two maps of the Earth that led to this idea. One was a photo of the entire Earth taken at night, made from many satellite photos mosaiced together. The other is a live display that they have in a lobby at Google, that shows a real-time display of queries submitted to their search engine, in the form of bright spikes whose height is proportional to the rate of query submissions.
In both of these, most of the world was lit up - except for Africa. South Africa had some light, but most of Africa was dark.
Maybe if we taught African kids to write software, they could start businesses that would make their lives better.
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If you just got done reviewing two machines each with a 7" screen, that extra half inch on the third may well seem like a wonderful relief!
...and Eee & an XO. I would have to agree that the Eee is a better system in general, but the screen is small. My 13 y/o daughter uses it with an external monitor when she is at her desk. My 7 y/o son has the XO and likes it a lot, however he complains that he cannot print anything (CUPS printing is not integrated in the interface). One thing I really like about the XO is the ease of adding new applications. Getting new apps to appear in the Eee's 'easy mode' is a headache at best. But the included suite is hard to beat. The touchpad on the XO is useless as its' sensitivity seems to be set way too high. But it found my wireless USB mouse without a problem. I think both systems are well suited to their respective target audiences.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
If the speakers weren't there, I doubt the screen would be an inch bigger.
The 7 inch screens are a commodity (think portable DVD player) and as such are cheapish to produce. A 9 inch screen (the next logical step up in my mind), are more expensive now, likely because their demand is lower. I'm sure they could offer a larger screen, but at a much much higher cost, one that wouldn't compete well with the $500 low-end notebooks.
-mls
In addition, a larger screen would draw more power; something the Eee and it's small battery try to sip.
-mls
I applaud the efforts of government and charity to improve living conditions by donating money, but it won't be sustainable until those in need can earn the money through the sweat of their own brows.
Look at what it's doing for India, that they built the Indian Institutes of Technology, whose graduates are now doing software development for worldwide customers.
And yes, I realize this isn't patriotic.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The classmate is a joke. The only thing the Classmate buys is a faster processor, a real keyboard, and 2x the Flash. For 50%-100% more cash.
In return, it is not as rugged (cooling fan and open interior, LiIon batteries, electrolytics, conventional hinge, clunky insecure closure, thick), nor as cheap, nor as useful (sunlight readable display), nor as appropriate for the 3rd world (a >50W power supply!?!).
Also, Windows doesn't understand how to use the Classmate's screen, either having it scroll up and down or squashing the display to fit.
I'd want Windows on the XO, with Windows understanding the screen resolution. THAT would be a nice combination, as Sugar is an abomination all to itself.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I slapped XP on the thing and upgraded the ram to 2 gigs. The SD card slot has a nice 16 gig card in it with Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 installed. I run them at the low end resolution mode which fits fine on this screen.
Oh wait, this is about educational use?? Uh... yeah I take my EEE PC to meetings and if I had this during college I'd have loved it for note taking. It's a sound educational tool that works great with my campus's wired and wireless access points.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
It happens that I studied Russian in college. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I had a similar idea, not so much to teach kids but to help exisiting Russian software engineers start software businesses so they could trade with the West.
I happened to meet Esther Dyson when she came to speak at Apple, where I worked at the time. She had traveled extensively in Russia, trying to bootstrap the software industry. When I told her my idea, she grabbed my arm and imperatively said "Russia needs you".
But in the end, I never acted on my idea.
I have a good job with a good company, and great coworkers. But I'm getting old, and feeling very concerned about what I'm going to leave behind when I'm gone. I know none of my code is going to outlive me. I'd like to leave more of a legacy than having gotten a lot of other people rich by writing proprietary code for them.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Here are my impressions, which are also worthless:
The eee certainly is stylish. I really like the hardware hacking you can do with it. I don't like the screen, though--not that it is too small physically, but that the resolution is so low, that text on the screen has to be larger in order to read it, which makes the screen effectively too small. Does that make sense?
My OLPC I really like, though again nothing is perfect. The hardware is top notch (though I have read of keyboard failures, that could happen to any manufacturer). The screen is great, I can read it in bright sunlight, I can flip it around and use it as an "ebook reader"--mostly to read pdf documentation for other software I use. I don't need to read that in direct sunlight, though.
One can't really complain about keyboards designed for children, but both the OLPC's keyboard and the eee (designed for adults) are about the same physical size, which means I can't touch type on either, but the fact that the keys are physically smaller on the OLPC, with a large gap between keys makes the occasional two-key press on the OLPC much less frequent than an eee.
One thing I really HATE, though, about the OLPC is that crappy sugarUI, and the whole activity vs. application paradigm. I also can't stand that file system hierarchies are ignored, and everything is collapsed to a single flat directory. How do I then save things to the correct subdirectory on my usb drive?
There are guides available to boot OLPC into ubuntu, for instance, but so far I've been too lazy to do so, especially since I have other options as far as hardware goes.
Classmate? meh, don't know, don't care. The few online reviews I have seen have not been flattering. The one plus, it doesn't have the sugarUI. The downside? Windows.
My wishlist for an UMPC would be: an OLPC, only slightly wider so it can acomodate a keyboard just large enough for me to touch-type, with ubuntu preloaded. If they make the next-gen eee an inch or so wider for the same reason, only with a decent screen (even if it is not as good as OLPC's) then I would settle for that.
More music, fewer hits
You do realize that the Eee PC900 was announced today at CeBIT, don't you? http://eeesite.net/2008/03/asus-announces-next-generation-eee-pc.html
Res publica non dominetur
>7.5 > 7 ok..here we go - http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/03/asus-set-to-announce-9-inch-eee-pc-900/
Eee PC's 9 inch version.
If it's a 4:3 screen, then the OLPC is giving you almost 15% more screen.
That's not so trivial.
You forgot. The OLPC is a freakn 1200 x 900 display. Not 800x600. It's the highest dot pitch display I've ever seen.
As someone stated earlier : you can install xubuntu (for example) on the XO ... It would save you the trouble of replaceing one "abomination" with another more expensive and slower one. ;)
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
So why not get a 4 year old laptop? I doubt my T40 Thinkpad is worth more than $350. It has a Centrino 1.5Ghz, (originally 512MB RAM since doubled), a CDRW/DVD player, built in 802.11b (easily replaced with a $4 PCCard adapter, an 80GB drive. Plus it's not a clunky heavy machine like am R41 Thinkpad, albeit a 7 year old could easily drop it.
/., my Fortune 50 company has decided not to upgrade any machines >900Mhz for at least another year. So if that's good enough for corporate apps it's good enough for 7 year olds. In other words you could get a 5 year old laptop worth maybe $300 or slightly less and compare that to one of these machines.
And for what it's worth, GAMERZ D00DZ at
I knew it was coming, but didn't realize it had been announced yet.
9 inch screen and more RAM and storage for 100 Euros more ($150 US).
399 Euro's equates to $600 at today's rates. Like I said, you can get a low-end full-size notebook (with the Vista tax even) for that price or less. The only thing you lose with the full size, well, is the compact and easy to carry size. Battery life might be better with the Eee, though that is hard to compare without specifics.
-mls
Probably because of Sugar vs XP and others.
I've tried Sugar (on a PC, LiveCD), and it's designed for small display. The icons are big, spaced wide apart, there are no very small elements of the UI at all, the windowless interface always gives whole screen real estate to the currently running application, you never find yourself struggling to decipher some tiny text or click some small piece of UI. It manages the available space well and provides a very good middle ground between number of items visible on the screen at any time and depth of user interface trees.
OTOH WinXP is barely capable of running at 800x600 and not one dialog window will simply not fit on the screen. Switch your XP desktop to 800x600 and try playing with it for a few hours, I assure you you'll feel the screen is cramped and the interface clunky and uncomfortable. Lots of scrolling, lots of opening additional submenus, moving windows, blindly pressing enter in hope it accepts the "OK" of a dialog that didn't fit on the screen and isn't resizable - I did use XP in 800x600 for a while and it does feel cramped.
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umm, it actually does http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.wired.com%2Fgadgets%2F2007%2F12%2Fvista-running-o.html&ei=r1bMR-f9EpO0igHi2KGoDg&usg=AFQjCNFleLdNPAdq_3BKEwST9aHFIumWLA&sig2=G0nVxLoA77m_jWLEz3R6rA
I'm not sure about the third, but the EEE PC gets ~2.5-3 hours, while the OLPC can get 10-12 in black and white mode. So their goes your fig-brained idea.
You forget that not all inches are equal. Since the OLPC has a squarer aspect ratio (4:3) than the other laptops (5:3) the same seven inches actually means more display area for the OLPC. This difference plus the extra .5" for the OLPC give the OLPC a display area about 6 square inches larger than the display area of the other laptops.
Add to that approximately three times the resolution (1200x900 vs 800x480) and it becomes pretty obvious that the OLPC has a much less cramped screen.
While you CAN access the console, install vim, gcc, even maybe Eclipse (if you add a pendrive to fit it), and develop any 'adult' software on XO, it IS designed and built to teach Python.
Almost all apps in Sugar are written in Python and their code is readily available and freely editable from inside Sugar. They are safely sandboxed so you won't break anything permanently, but you're encouraged to modify existing ones and write new ones - using the libraries in the system.
The laptop is meant to reveal its layers to the kid as the kid's experience grows. First - games and activities accessible by big, friendly buttons. Then, two of the activities are different programming toys - procedural, building program from bricks, and event-driven one. You gain basics of programming. Then you press a specific button and you get the source of the underlying app. At first you learn by modifying it, editing it - change colors, change texts, maybe move things around a bit. The python code is clean and well commented. Then you can try your own "hello world" and write your own python software that will run under Sugar. As you become expert at Python, you'll learn to use the mysterious "terminal" thing and write without GUI, download other libraries and languages. Nothing is unavailable, but to make sense of some parts you need experience in the easier ones. A 6yo who just begins to learn reading won't find Python sources very interesting, and won't mess with them at least until the brick-language becomes too limiting.
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The OLPC is a freakn 1200 x 900 display. Not 800x600. It's the highest dot pitch display I've ever seen.
The OLPC's resolution is given in what would be termed "subpixels" on a traditional display. So in one sense, an 800x600 RGB-stripe LCD of the same size would actually have a higher resolution: 1.44 million fixed-chroma/variable-intensity picture elements, vs. 1.08 million for the OLPC screen.
I put this comparison up weeks ago, mostly for friends who were debating which one to purchase ...
http://siliconchef.com/2008/01/31/subnotebook-gladiators-part-2/
Overall I think the EeePC is the more flexible unit for the typical computer user. The OLPC has some great features and concepts, but casual use is limited by design features that make it great for the 3rd world market.
I would disagree. I use an Eee for a lot of stuff because it's small and portable. It's obviously not good for graphics programmes, but I would never use anything smaller than a regular laptop for that anyway (and I wouldn't even think of using it for gaming!) It's fine for actually viewing photos. Word processing is perfectly good, especially if you're prepared to play with the settings to allow the text to fill the screen. Ditto email and web. I code on it too, and again the size doesn't cause a problem.
I'm sure some people who've used an Eee haven't had as good an experience, and that's fair enough. But I would say don't write it off until you've actually tried it for a while. It takes some getting used to, but a month down the line I think it's one of the best purchases I've ever made.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
This is very true. I recently got to play with an OLPC and was really blown away by what it was compared to what the online consensus of people who have never touched out.
Its a simple education toy that only looks like a laptop. Its more of a specialized educational gadget like a speak and spell than a Dell. Its keyboard is tiny and only for little kid fingers. Its slow and has a very simplified interface. It cant do WPA and has no ethernet port. Its screen is like a very cheap version of e-ink.
I dont see what this has in common with the eeepc. The eeepc is a ulw general purpose laptop. The XO is an educational device for children.
Except, and I know this is obvious but for those not aware, no other LCD display can use it's full set of subpixels in B&W mode for things like text rendering, like the OLPC can. So during full-colour use it's effective resolution is roughly 800x600, it also has the option of acting as a full, 1200x900 B&W display. And, let me tell ya, in that mode, it looks *fantastic*.
OLPC's screen isn't chroma fixed.
The other screens give you either 800x600 color pixels or 2400x600 subpixel with ugly color smearing on the antialasied edge (I just can't stand subpixel rendering. I find the color effects ugly) and non-square pixels (of course, each subpixels is a vertical rectangle wide 1/3 of its height).
OLPC's screen is either approx. 600x450 color pixels (in transflective mode).
Or 1200x900 actual black'n'white pixels when in ebook mode (in reflective mode), no subpixel color artefacts, and high resolution mode has approx. square pixels.
When displaying plain text, OLPC's display is better, more accurate and less power hungry.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Everyone repeat after me, "It's an education project, not a laptop project."
I have watched several children play around with my XO, and not once has any of them ever asked me how to start or stop an activity using the Sugar UI. Truly, it is a brilliantly simple interface.
Frankly, the Journal is one of the very best parts of the whole thing. The XO remembers everything you do, automatically. You don't have to hit "save" when you've finished writing something, or deal with "files" and "folders" -- kids have no concept of such abstractions. You just use the durn thing, and it records everything for you, silently and efficiently. When you want to go back to what you were doing, you go to your Journal, and bingo, there it is. One click, and you're back in the saddle.
The key point here is to remember that Sugar is for kids. If you want an adult interface, you can install XFCE or your adult-sized distro of choice. Since it's just a standard Linux box, it's really easy to explore.
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I bet the guy responsible for that also puts ferrets down his trousers. Remember, just cos you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?