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OLPC's XO-3 Prototype Tablet Coming In 2010
itwbennett writes "During an interview Tuesday at the MIT Media Lab, OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte said that the group will have a working prototype of the XO-3 tablet by December of this year. 'At CES [2011] we will show a tablet that can be and will be used for children probably in the developed world,' Negroponte said. 'You'll see from us, God willing, an ARM tablet,' he said. 'The screen area will probably be a 9-inch diagonal, maybe more.' The most important feature will be a dual-mode display that will allow it to be used indoors and outdoors. Price: $75."
What's the problem with keyboards? Since tablets seem to be very consumer-ey, isn't removing the keyboard from the OLPC contrary to the aims of the project?
I realize they had lofty goals, but to see them fail so utterly in their mission takes away most of their credibility. The whole point was to bring computers to the developing world and break vendor lock in.
Good-bye
This seems like a wonderful idea. My handheld GPS has one of these -- it can function with a backlight in the dark just fine, but turn the backlight off, take it outside, and it's a perfectly readable, color display which draws hardly any power.
I remenber the first time that idea was show here on slashdot, I (and lots of other geeks) where salivating about the idea of a "portable laptop". I even remenber people talking about "100$? I would pay 300$ for that!". The OLPC has made this dream real, and now we have our 200$ and 300$ cheap and very usefull "netbooks". I call this a huge succes (:
-Woof woof woof!
This is probably going to get me modded as troll, but I'm curious anyways. How much of the low price is dependant on our exploitation of cheap labor? One laptop per-child made by a child? (well, probably a young adult anyways) Even with markets of scale, 75$ is an impressive price tag.
Having read about the indoor/outdoor display tech, but never having seen it, I want it. When will OLPC license it to other companies?
1 - If it'll only be done 'god willing', then we have a problem because there is no god.
2 - We've already seen what happened to the OLPC project. It's a nice idea, but this guys are just circle jerking, Negroponte dreams, but can't deliver.
3 - The market is already heading there. There is no need for the OLPC. There are already countless netbooks for well under 100 dollars in China. There are 100 dollar touchpads. I think the foundation should focus on the hardest part, step 2: Getting governments, the UN, or whoever to invest in this stuff, and just import the best and cheapest alternative from China and install proper software on it.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
lockup up in the loony bin or change the industry in a huge way.
If he can deliver what the render is, or even close, it will basically make tablet/ebook reader like the digital watch. Mass produced, inexpensive and everywhere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Boy, I hope they're using Mary Lou Jepsen's Pixel Qi (http://www.pixelqi.com/) screens. I am far from a hardcore programming geek, but I could use something like this for a simple E-reader and Mutt email device.
She also has a blog: http://pixelqi.com/blog1/
Supposedly, hackers will be able to buy raw screens for DIY projects. Might be ideal for hooking up to a BeagleBoard.
9" transflective ARM tablet? I want one. Price $75? Well ... that price might have *some* basis, but I suspect that's not the out-the-door price.
The $100 laptop (and note, I'm not complaining, and I realize that the $100 figure was not promised to Moses on Mt. Sinai) turned out to be, realistically for me and many others, $400, through the Give One Get One program. (And I think $400 well spent; I like the idea, and the hardware is really cool, despite its limitations.)
Does that mean a 9" ARM tablet would be $300? :) Hey, $150 would be even better, and $75 would mean I could buy one apiece for several young relatives. (And I'd rather get them that way than, say, a big misguided, mismanaged government school Program.)
Tim
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
can Twitter for food!!!!
Queue the OLPC Prototype of X-Device coming in 2011, 2012, and so forth to 2204.
P.S. Nationalize British Petroleum and donate The Queen's and the Bush Crime Family shares to OLPC !!
Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$75 for a tablet? You get to a point where the cost of the packaging and shipping exceeds the product. When you have a large portion of a continent with no infrastructure, where the only real business is the military, does putting cheap Chinese tablets in the hands of poor kids really help?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
have you tried reading much of anything in full sunlight outside using a netbook? And what about mesh networking, drop tests and all the other engineering which makes the XO more than just a little computer.
you've obviously never understood what the original requirements for the OLPC project was. Google for how Intel loaded up a classroom with their little ClassmatePC netbooks and then had to go back and drop a large diesel generator outside the classroom so the kids could use the devices throughout the day.
OLPC XO is not a netbook.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
'You'll see from us, God willing, an Arm tablet,'
Jesus already created the iPad
speaking of mesh networks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsukuku
i hope it will work on wlan cards. the XO used 802.11s I don't know what makes the "s" special for meshing if the above is true.
they don't screw it over with a non-Android operating system, I'm glad to hear it. Aside from Windows, any new computer has 3 choices: Android. Ubuntu. Suicide.
Remember the netbook war.
OLPC XO-1 is the thing that largely brought you netbooks & cheap ultraportables in the first place.
Now, as far as consumer markets are concerned, they might be doing this with tablets. Publicly showing PR drones what's their proper price range.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Sell them at a profit (cost plus 10%) in the -first- world, use profit to subsidize (cost minus 25%) sales in the -third- world market. We're perfectly willing to help you out financially, just not buy 2 get one.
there are 1.5 million kids out there using OLPC laptops. for example, every elementary school kid in uruguay has an XO. i'm having trouble seeing the failure in this.
Or describing some of the desing criteria shortly: OLPC XO is an inexpensive variant of...Toughbook.
BTW, screens essentially from the XO are perhaps finally coming also to some netbooks, via Pixel Qi (PQ also seems to start supplying them to tablets in general of course; and will do it for XO-3)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Any time you hear a project manager say "God Willing" about a deliverable or date you know they are flat out lying.
For all of you who are lusting after a $75 pad with daylight-readable (dual mode) display, just remember this:
OLPC is not promising that any J. Random Individual will ever be able to buy one from the organization.
(I also wouldn't take any of the specifications as gosphel at this point, either. Except it will probably run the Sugar-compliant XO-1 and XO-1.5 applications which were coded in Python.)
> OLPC XO-1 is the thing that largely brought you netbooks & cheap ultraportables in the first place.
Rubbish.
Moore's law is what brought us netbooks and cheap ultraportables.
The march of technology is what turns a $2000 vaio into a $400 vaio.
Moore's law was turning Amigas into PalmPilots long before it occured to Negroponte to try and be the world's benefactor.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A bit off topic. The OLPC folks are looking for donation of the OLPC-1 for use in Haiti. Check out http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_for_Haiti for details.
You have short memory. When was the time that Intel introduced first netbook design / first cheap ultraportable? (not relying much on proper application of Moore's law too - they simply quickly threw together a bit old at that point, and not fully adequate, tech)
One that hath name thou can not otter
but like so many muggles out there, Negroponte believed the crap Microsoft was telling him.
OLPC was sold as a take-it-or-leave-it package deal to the third world education minister.
The hardware. The software. Linux, FOSS and SUGAR.
The constructivist philosophy of education - the classroom without a teacher, to simplify things drastically.
The education minister wasn't buying into any of this.
The push for Windows and Office came from him.
Deployment of the XO beyond Central and South America was and remains insignificant, with the sole exception of Rwanda - and that came a year after dual-booting XP and MS Office became an option.
Total confirmed deployment is about 1.3 million units. One Laptop Per Child [Summary of laptop orders}
Deployment of the XO beyond Central and South America is almost non-existent. Rwanda is the only real success story.
Apparently (according to this http://www.olpcnews.com/laptops/xo-3/new_xo-3_announced_just_a_marv.html posting), the XO-3 will be a re-branded Marvel Moby tablet. So much for rugged designed-for-kids. Several articles have appeared today on OLPC News about the deal.
So Central and South America do not count?
Those kids do not need these laptops?
Heh... That's even inaccurate, even though it does a better job of things than many have in the past. A Toughbook fails on power endurance and sunglight display function compared to an XO-1
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I dunno, if they can grow human ears on the backs of mice, I don't know why it wouldn't be possible to grow a keyboard together with a spare set of hands, or find a way to grow hands out of a keyboard.
Potentially kinda kinky, though. I'm not sure I want to think too much about where you'd go with that.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I did the buy one, donate one to a 3rd world kid program with the first OLPC. I could not believe what a piece of crap the OLPC was when I got it. I could not even IM from it. I felt so bad that I had inflicted that on some poor child somewhere. If I could find the poor kid that ended up with the OLPC I paid for, I would happily send them a MacBook Air as a way of apologizing and showing that not all computers sucked.
. . . that allowing the manufacturer to sell directly to the public (Perhaps in a different color) will drive down the cost of the unit because of larger production volumes. That is after all why the origional OLPC missed the $100 PC missed it's target price.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I have no doubt that you will be able to buy several sub-$100 tablets later this year, running Android. They will be mostly crap (slow hardware, small batteries, resistive touchscreens), but they will be there. The markets in Asia and especially China are huge.
Here is an iPad-clone for $73.
http://www.marvell.com/company/news/press_detail.html?releaseID=1418
> OLPC XO-1 is the thing that largely brought you netbooks & cheap ultraportables in the first place.
Rubbish.
Moore's law is what brought us netbooks and cheap ultraportables.
As I recall, before the advent of the XO the tech industry was focused on selling us ever more processing power at a fixed price point.
Negroponte was pushing the notion a $100 laptop for kids despite feedback the cost structure did not support the price. His comment was to the effect the volume would drive the price $100, and that indicated a clear lack of understanding of the cost problem as it relates to components and manufacturing. This still looks like a bunch of hype to drive money in their labs. If he pushed for driving the cost of tablets down vs this OLPC/XO thing I would have more respect for him, because that's the real way to enable low cost kid-tops.
I'm getting mixed signals here.
What's that we're looking at? A "rendering"? Spare me please... I'm still waiting for all that stuff from that "Beyond 2000" program..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Hence "some of the desing criteria" (still large part either way)
One that hath name thou can not otter
xo-3 will be a one of a family of tablets developed in partnership with marvell, all based more or less on the moby, as a references. the xo-3 will certainly be designed to meet the needs of developing-world children -- there would be no point, otherwise.
The problem is patents. Remember they got sued for using someone else's patented "use a key for another language's alphabet" technique. So they're dumping the keyboard. Crap idea IMO, but what else can they do??
That those children or young adults go to the local rubbish dump and try to make a living by collecting anything that may still have some minimal value?
What we should be fighting for is for good working conditions for children and people in general (children, when they need to work, should do it in very controlled conditions ensuring no abuse takes place, short shifts, all pay paid, etc. A blanket ban on working children may actually be not in the interests of many children out there ).
What many people in rich countries fail miserably to understand is that working is not necessarily the worst option for many children out there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.