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First Review of Intel's New Classmate PC
An anonymous reader writes "Intel gave the press a sneak preview of its 3rd generation Classmate PC at IDF. It looks like this guy managed to kidnap the only working sample for a while and write up a full report. It looks like a major departure from the original, with a rotating touch screen and Atom processor. There's no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade."
Among other things, of course.
OLPC seems to be plugging away as hard as ever since all that angst over XP.
And some users are figuring out how to install regular linux desktops in an easier way. (Sugar's pretty hard for expert users to get used to.)
Obligatory on-topic snark: does ClassmatePC come with a virus checker?
Wow... frankly, that's pretty dick.
OLPC started the whole sub-mini notebook craze. It was Wintel that did the raining*. It's bad enough the American monopolies had to get their greedy paws in the OLPC pie; let's at least keep the facts straight.
[*] - http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4472654.ece
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Are these kind of devises more for the show or are they really useful.
... but from my point of view nothing beat having a pen and a paper to take quick notes, making a drawing, ... during a speech/course.
Personally, I always find myself writing notes faster with a pen and paper. I have tried several alternatives ranging from Palm, Pocket PCs, having a laptop with me
If anybody here know a good solution, I would be glad to know how I could find a good replacement. My principal issue with paper notes is that it is easy to lose and take more time to classify them.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Seriously, why, if they still insist on sticking to XP do they have an application as part of the GUI but clearly still have the XP bar at the bottom? Wouldn't it be better for a system that is supposed to be low end and cheap to at least use the normal XP GUI or a totally different shell?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Then how come in one of the photo the laptop has the "intel inside" sticker and in another photo it's not there?
That tiny pivot in the middle seems like a good target for kids to break the computer.
when this was about bring open devices to poor, but not too poor, children. Now it's just a new first-world toy.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
From TFA: I can understand why a Windows environment would be considered desirable in an educational tool, since the children will be learning to use the OS and applications that theyâ(TM)ll be encountering in their adult life.
What a brillant insight!
See, a kid using Windows XP in high school will encounter Windows XP applications in ten or fifteen years. Why, he will work with only Windows XP his whole adult life. Otherwise, he'd have to be trained to be flexible and to learn by himself as soon as high school.
This brilliant insight also explains why Vista has failed on the marketplace. Why, when the average worker left high school school in the 80s, all the Apple IIs and C-64s in the school computer labs were running only Windows XP! No wonder he refuses Vista!
Thank God we have good, insightful journalists in this country. Otherwise, we might see all kind of crap printed on the web.
Note: yes, that was sarcasm. All of it. Thank you for noticing.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
It looks like this guy managed to kidnap the only working sample ...
Someone kidnapped my Classmate! Amber alert! Amber alert!
The review doesn't mention OLPC once, and we're supposed to take it even remotely seriously? Why would that possibly happen if not for a requirement from Intel that the review not mention the OLPC.
That's like reviewing a portable music player and not comparing it against an iPod. Once a product has that kind of mindshare, it's just irresponsible not to compare.
(verification word: reinvent. yeah, that's about right)
There's no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade.
Huh?
Let's do a quick review.
0) OLPC starts working on a laptop. It has a non-Intel chip and is designed for ultra power efficiency.
1) Intel starts working on their own laptop. Intel's of course has an Intel CPU; and it is designed to run Windows.
2) Official Intel sales people start trying to sell the Classmate to countries that are considering the OLPC laptop. In at least one case, an Intel sales person went to a country that had already agreed to buy OLPC laptops, and said in effect "That thing won't even run Windows... you sure you really want it?" At the time, Intel was officially a member of OLPC. (Rogue sales people? Evil corporate double-dealing? You decide.)
Now, what's up with "no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade"? The OLPC guys are the overbearing bullies and Intel is the underdog here?
I'm sure there are markets for something like the Classmate PC. I don't think it's the best choice for places with no electric infrastructure. And it has a cooling fan, so I don't think it's the best choice for places that are really hot, humid, and/or dusty. And I'm sure it costs about twice as much as the OLPC, so I don't think it's the best choice for the truly poor markets. And it almost certainly is much harder to repair than the OLPC design.[1] Hmmm. Am I raining on Intel's parade?
All that said, the world is a large place full of lots of kids. No way can OLPC crank out enough computers to help everyone. If Intel can sell their computer into the more affluent areas, they can make money. If their sales people can leave the OLPC markets alone, maybe Intel and OLPC can just get along.
P.S. I suspect that neither OLPC nor Intel will have the last word on educational computers for the masses. I'm starting to think that the best design would be a simple tablet that actually does cost $100 or less, and probably runs an ARM chip or something for crazy long battery life.
steveha
[1] From the photos, it's a pretty conventional clamshell, which means lots of connections running through the hinge so the motherboard can be in the base and the display in the lid; the OLPC design has motherboard and display in the lid, so that all that needs to run through the hinge is basically a USB cable. Teen-aged kids, armed with simple screwdrivers, can take apart two broken OLPC laptops, swap parts, and produce a working OLPC laptop. I really doubt this will be possible with the Classmate.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
From the article:
That's quite the prediction there, predicting what OS is going to be in predominant use when today's 7-year-olds enter the knowledge workforce in 15+ years. And even if the author turns out to be correct, and Windows is still in predominant use beyond 2020, it's highly doubtful that whatever version is in use then is going to come close to resembling Windows XP.
Really, at the age group these systems are targeted towards, the operating system shouldn't matter. The ideal of these systems isn't to teach operating system usage, but to use interactive applications for sharing information and teaching non-computer skills. You could do that with OS/2, and it's not going to impair anyone's ability to learn how to use an OS in the future. Heck, I started back at that age on a Commodore PET, and it certainly hasn't affected my ability to use a modern day OS.
Yaz.
I thought the XP version that was allowed on low cost PCs had restrictions that prohibited using touch screens. Did Microsoft change those rules?
One session has a round gray carpet table, missing Intel sticker, and 11 Quick Launcher icons. The other session has a hard Formica table, the Intel sticker, and 9 Quick Launcher icons.
Looks decent and maybe useful for more than kids. Now - why to think kids are stupid or something. I'm not talking about XP, I can see it running in such machine. Of course Linux gives much more with much less money but a computer is just a computer? My kids have used (my) computers since they were three, never broke anything, boys built their own at age of 8, have no problems whatever OS they have to use, even the one who doesn't care about computers but cars (you know how many separate computers can be in a modern car like new Porches?) And the computers when they were 3 were not PCs - two terminals hanging on two X.25 lines to several big systems, other toys came later.
Kids and computers are like kids and languages - they have no problems at pre-school age to learn 3 or 4 foreign languages in a couple of months in right environment just for fun - seen that! Try that when over 20. Same with computers - if they find it fun, they can learn anything. And most kids never break things, they are just (maybe) a little more accident prone and schools up to college are a harsh environment, more than most workplaces - heh! I wonder if this would tolerate the adults, leaving the notebook top of the car, driving over it or sometimes even shooting the damn computer?
Why does nobody seem to be able to figure this out?
The idea behind OLPC is to teach, not to teach how to use a PC.
No sig today...
Perhaps it will have to ship with Vista.
Have you tried a Tablet PC. The pricier ones work great. Just don't buy a cheap ones (HP had some awful ones for 800USD a while back and it turned a lot of people off them, personally Toshiba's have worked great, YMMV) you'll have a hard time writing. You need to pay ~1500-2000USD to get something that will really work well.
What's with the keyboard layouts on subnotebooks lately? Are they trying to slowly make the right shift key unusable enough that it can be removed completely? I, for one really, really don't want the arrow up to be on the left side of right shift.
And why have three keys on the right side of P and two keys on the right side of L and have the enter be the wrong shape.
To be fair, I also hate the HP laptop layout I'm using at the moment where home, pgup, pgdn and end are on the right side of bs, enter and right shift. I like the layout on my Lenovo shich has these extra keys basically below right shift and above backspace where they are not constantly hit accidentally when typing.
I am as quick when using an already booted computer ...
For quick note taking, nothing beats paper and pencil, I believe. (To take audio recordings is annoying for your environment, and it takes much more time to rehear those notes than to read them written on paper or some electronic device.)
Not that I have a good solution for you, but I use a bunch of text files (with descriptive names) as my main store of notes. When my computer is powered off, I use paper. Most important is to transcribe these notes as soon as possible to the searchable digital archive (and then immediately[1] destroy the paper note). Alternatively, mark the note as read.
I dislike those fluorescent or bright yellow and green markers which some people use to highlight text (after copying, the highlighted text becomes hard to decipher; those markers are *not* useful for highlighting). But they are ideal for marking notes as read. ;) Just cross out your note; it is still readable in an emergency, but you know you can destroy it after your next backup.
[1] Not immediately, but as soon as you've backed up your digital transcription.
Distributing Windows platforms to kids in third-world countries.
Windows - hook em while they're young.
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How difficult would it be the young woman who entered office work as a typist in 1888 to adapt to the office of 2008?
The young man in accounting?
Local museums have ledgers, correspondence and promotional material - paper ephemerals - from local businesses active in the 1850s ---and it is all quite familiar.
You can turn the clock back another century to the fur-trading posts of the 1750s --- and still find nothing strange from a purely commercial point-of-view.
MS Office is what it is because it is shaped by the requirements and traditions of clerical work that go back hundreds of years.
That is why it is so very, very hard for projects like OpenOffice.org to come up with anything truly innovative - no matter how much money Big Daddy Sun pours into the bin.
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It isn't hardware failure that drives the home and SOHO user to upgrade.
It is the chance to massively upgrade hardware and software at the OEM price. The HP Quad Core 64 Bit Vista Premium PC with 4 GB RAM and NVIDIA 9600 graphics and 1 TB of storage is $1000 at Walmart.com.
The Duo Core 32 Bit Vista Premium PC with 2 GB RAM starts at $329 at Walmart.com.
A .8% loss isn't horrible, but Macs grew 1.12% and Linux grew 33%
If Vista is growing(in gross numbers, as opposed to percentages), Linux and Mac are growing faster in relative terms according to your chart.
Take a look at the numbers again and you will see OSX hitting a wall - a 5% share for the MacIntel that hasn't changed significantly in months.
As for Linux, it seems to be settling back into a barely visible 0.02% growth each month, a pity, since it looked as if this might be the year when the mass market OEM Linux PC broke into the single digit
Relative growth simply isn't very impressive when you begin from so small a base.
Does this new Classmate still come with the all important Trusted Platform Module?
After all... Intel wants to make sure that third world kids are introduced to the wonders of hardware DRM nice and early.. no matter if it adds to the cost of the machine.
Newer ones are basically flash based mp3 players using a different recording codec. Most plug directly into the usb ports on your pc/laptop like a flash pen, so you can just chuck the files on to review or transcribe at a later time.
If you've got some well trained Voice-rec software, even better.