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OLPC 2.0 — One Laptop Foundation Reboots
Greg Huang writes "In early January, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation laid off half its staff and shed work on the Sugar graphical interface. Now, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and president Chuck Kane for the first time detail the foundation's new plans, describe how the XO laptop will do what netbooks can't do, and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year."
I have preordered the Pandora console and I'm happy. It gives me about 10h of running Ubuntu on an ARM cpu in a mere 0.3 kg of weight.
Oh thre's also an unofficial blog and a video vault. You might like the forums too.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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They also sabotaged their own efforts by NOT offering these units to the general public. Their limited "Buy One Give One" program was too little, too late.
If they had allowed the sale of the units to the general public, or even domestic markets (which I think they eventually did let one school district in the USA buy them) they would not have had such difficulty securing the minimum orders to secure their price point. They would also have had a revenue stream to sustain themselves and subsidize units for distribution in poorer areas. And they could STILL have remained a non-profit business while doing so.
Instead, Negroponte decided that it wasn't enough to give learning computers to underprivileged children in third-world coutnries - he also had to ensure that anyone who could actually afford them would be denied.
But the window of opportunity is now closed: The Asus Eee PC and similar products are satisfying the market the XO only teased. Sure the XO has a few features that other netbooks don't, but the novelty that could have taken them "over the hump" has worn off and now they're screwed.
=Smidge=
I have an OLPC XO-1 and have logged a fairy decent amount of time on eee PCs(contract job, an outfit was looking to make citrix thin clients out of them).
My comparision: eeePC is notably more powerful, no question. It also feels more like a "real" computer, probably because of the hard top, rather than rubber, keyboard(also the color, obviously). The screen, though, is something else entirely. With the backlight off, or in bright sunlight, you get a 1200x900, very sharp, very readable, 200dpi, reflective LCD screen. With backlight on, or in lower light, you get color at somewhat lower, though still adequate, effective resolution. The screen is the big deal. In color mode, it is as good or better than a standard netbook screen. In greyscale, it is by far the best electronic reading device I've ever used(e-ink might be better; I've not seen it). The mesh stuff is cute; but not something I've had a chance to play with much. Sugar is interesting; but other linuxes work as well.
I can certainly see why netbooks would be largely preferable in many situations; but they cannot touch the OLPC screen, for my purposes, nor do they have any of the cute collaborative stuff(whose utility I cannot comment on).
My -- that is my *daughter's* -- XO is very low power. Whether it's the power savings across the whole chipset, the ability to enter certain sleep states while keeping the display on, no hard drive, whatever: it's got a tiny power supply, charges quickly (bonus: with a wide range of input voltages!), and never gets hot. Seems really freakin' low power to me.
Of course, others have pointed out that it's rugged. (If you haven't handled one, it's easy to fail to appreciate this fully.)
The keyboard is fine. Not great, but fine. And certainly tough. If you're a kid, it's great. No, you're not going to break any world records for typing speeds, but that's not what it's for.
But all this ignores the software. I'm not a fan of Sugar, but I do see just how much it buys you from an educational perspective. If you wanted to get a kid to start learning to program, this computer is *ideal*. The programming activities are just begging for you to tinker, and the fact that it's all Python means that as you learn, you can start modifying the interface.
The basic activities draw in even very young children very quickly. My daughter at 2 liked hitting keys on the keyboard of the mac and the linux Thinkpad. She *loved* playing with the music activities, or even the simple text-to-speech program, on the XO. Sure, you could replicate the functionality on a netbook with linux. Unless you installed Sugar, however, you would have a *lot* of work to do to make it as inviting.
Again, I say this despite the fact that I don't like Sugar. IceWM and no journal trying to index 8 gig flash drives suits me fine. But to get kids seriously involved in computing, the software is as impressively put together as the hardware.
It's easy to say they should have sold them at $250 each. They thought they were going to get millions of orders from developing countries, and they didn't want to get distracted trying to serve the developed world. They didn't realize that Microsoft/Intel would undermine their efforts in the ways that they did. They were idealistic and focused and didn't foresee certain things. I'll cut them some slack, since their focus did result in something so beautifully engineered.
Bummer if they don't ship many millions of XOs, great that they showed what is possible in the neighborhood of $200-$300.
Even with the dropping prices of netbooks, I'd still say that an XO is worth $400. If your child would otherwise get a PS3, no question.
OLPC runs at below 2W all included, even below 1W in ebook reading mode, Netbooks need at least 20W all included.