The One Laptop Per Child project has seen mixed success. With competition from similar, but more familiar-looking items from Intel and others, the OLPC found itself suddenly competing in a market it had no intention of entering. But they’re out there, they’ve had some serious orders, and despite some other speed bumps, has certainly lent a hand in increasing computer literacy in the developing world.
You may remember that the sequel to the XO laptop, as the OLPC hardware was actually called, was spied at Davos in January after its initial debut in May of 2008. It was noted at the time that there was some doubt as to whether it would be made, and now those doubts have come to glorious anti-fruition. The XO-2 is dead — but only because Negroponte decided it should be a tablet.
One of the issues with the OLPC project has always been power. There’s just not electricity in all the parts of the world where the OLPC is intended to be used. There is a solution available, however, and it’s being tested in Afghanistan. We have just seen pictures of the first pedal power conversion for the OLPC.
Got an old sack o’ crap laptop or desktop gathering dust? Sugar Labs has just made its OLPC-friendly “Sugar” operating system into a USB-bootable version called Sugar on a Stick. You’ll need a one-gigabyte thumb drive and about twenty minutes of spare time.
While this is more a sociological issue than a technological one, it’s still interesting. Pilot programs in Ethiopia with the OLPC XO laptop have hit a major roadblock: teachers resent the device and consider it a toy. The reasons for this are complicated, but in essence it’s the nature of the educational system there. Imagine a school here in the US where the kids are learning design, coding, and a bunch of other interesting stuff but fare poorly on the SATs.
It’s a lot like that, except more so; the Ethiopian schools are very much about memorization and basic scholastic functions, while the OLPC is all about exploration and individual learning. It’s a classic horse and water problem.
India recently signed an agreement to purchase 250,000 XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Given India’s lukewarm reception to the concept in the past, it’s surprising to see that they are starting to buy into the concept.
Perhaps the success of the pilot program in 2007 has convinced them that this is a good idea. And while an Indian company has attempted to create a $10 alternative, their efforts have had little to no results.
The OLPC project, Hydra-like in its many initiatives, has given birth to a new project, focused on making an extremely versatile display with multiple modes, allowing consolidation of technology and (one hopes) reduction of total cost. After all, if a device is being used as an e-book, it shouldn’t be using TV technology to display the text; it’s both wasteful and less effective. So PixelQi is working on creating a display that’s good enough to work as both a high-definition LCD and a high-contrast e-paper surface as well.
Good news from the One Laptop Per Child program: the successor to the ambitious, but ultimately outmatched XO laptop will be open source hardware. Hopefully that will encourage adoption, imitation, and customization, leading the XO-2 to be hopefully more of a success than the XO.
Here we have the first image of the new OLPC netbook which may or may not actually ever come to market. Tariq Krim and Michael saw it at Davos today.
True to its word, Amazon is throwing its global retail reach into the OLPC XO mission this Christmas season. The site is now offering buy-one, send-one to a developing nation notebook program. Or if you as a seasonal philanthropist choose, Amazon will ship one to a child of your choice. ‘Tiss the season of giving, folks.
via PC World
Those crazy Europeans will be able to buy an XO Laptop, too. Amazon’s Euro stores will sell the little guy for £263 (or €313 or $390). That’s strange, considering the One Laptop Per Child program was initially billed as the $100 laptop. What are you gonna do?
The Guardian, home of the Football Weekly podcast, calls the whole program a “flop,” noting that it has fallen well short of its 100 million laptops sold goal. (To date, about 600,000 has been sold.)
And what does your Euros and Pounds gets you? A 433MHz AMD processor, 256MB of RAM and a pack of gum.
Yes, it’s underpowered for the money, but you’re also Doing Good—it’s part of the get one, give one program—by buying it, so there’s that.
The OLPC program just got a lot more mainstream, with word that Amazon will start selling the XO Laptop starting in November. It’ll be sold as part of the “Give One, Get One” program, meaning that for every XO Laptop you buy, one lucky youngster in a developing country will get one, too. (You’re actually paying for two laptops.) You’re doing charitable work with literally zero extra effort on your part.
What’s sorta weird is that the sales are currently only scheduled to continue through the end of December. Guess they’re counting on people’s Christmas Cheer, and rampant credit card debt, to help out the OLPC program. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.
In other OLPC news, it looks like a version of the XO Laptop that ships with, and dual boots into, Linux and Windows XP, is scheduled to ship in the next month (or so). That’s what an OLPC rep has said, adding that the new dual boot XO Laptop should help speed adoption rates around the world.
Dailymotion, sorta the YouTube of Europe, has inked a deal with the much-maligned OLPC folks to “explore collaborations involving Dailymotion’s technology and selected educational content to benefit underprivileged children globally.” Sounds important.
Unnecessary snark aside, it actually sounds like one of those “good causes” I like so much. The deal is such that the OLPC folks can now benefit from Dailymotion’s infrastructure to have kids create and share videos of their experiences using the built-in camera in the XO Laptop. To that end, Dailymotion has even gone to the trouble of creating a subdomain, olpc.dailymotion.com (that’s for XO Laptop users, regular folk will have to use dailymotion.com/group/olpc), where you’ll find all sorts of educational goodness.
But, since online it’s “cool” to hate on the OLPC folks for trying something different, maybe we should just tease them for each and every effort they make.
We’ve known for a while that Microsoft was going to be showing up on OLPC’s XO. Starting in September the little laptop meant to inspire children in developing countries will ship with two operating systems, a bare bones Windows XP and Linux Sugar. Hardware configurations remain the same (256 MB of RAM and 1GB SSD), so the SD card slot accommodates Windows XP. Which means by unplugging the SD card it restarts into Sugar – who knew uninstalling Microsoft products could be so easy?
Laptop Magazine took the laptop to test, with a hands on look at it running XP. They found a slow boot time with a long application load time. Streaming media had its share of hiccups, and multi-tasking could only go so far. That is not to say all was bad, after several hours with the XO, they concluded that it was running “pretty well”.
Ultimately, they see having Sugar and XP both available as options as being a good thing, and remain hopeful that OLPC will fine tune XP performance. Check out there rundown, complete with videos, here.
While we were stoked, if a little skeptical, about One Laptop Per Child’s dual touchscreen notebook design, it turns out someone has been working on one for years and it may actually be slightly more real than fairy dust.
In an interview, Valerio Cometti, founder of the Italian industrial design firm V12 Design, told Laptop that the firm came up with a dual screened laptop called Canova almost four years ago. Developed for “creative types,” the first generation, pictured above, was made of stainless steel and carbon fiber. Hard to actually call it a laptop though, as it didn’t run an operating system or software.
But the firm has since pitched the idea to laptop makers, and Cometti reportedly said that the second generation Canova will be complete and possibly even available in the U.S. in the next 16 months. Cometti did not reveal the name of the U.S. company with which it is working on the next generation machine, nor did he provide any photos (not suspicious at all).
Even so, we’re hopeful we might actually get to see a dual-touchscreen laptop before we’re old.
It’s no secret that Intel and the OLPC project parted ways a while back, and now I think we can cross the OS off the list of things Intel didn’t like about the project. Sugar Labs, which split off from OLPC as well, has shacked up with Intel to provide a kid-friendly interface for Intel’s Classmate PC.
Good news for everyone involved, I’d say. I always liked the idea of Sugar, though I was under the impression it had been built around the capabilities of the XO laptop. Of course, I’m sure they’re capable of refitting it, and if Intel thinks it would work for their machine, I’m sure it will. Apparently Sugar Labs is also working with a few other PC makers, though they were not specified. Maybe they’re going to be the developer of choice for the growing “tiny PC” market?
I’m glad that the second generation OLPC is more of an ebook than a laptop. While the “laptop,” as a designed object, is an excellent tool, books are what define our early education and creating an electronic book that works and is actively useful seems far more intelligent than the original OLPC, which was a stab at a “less is more” mentality that eventually hobbles the very people it is designed to help.
I consistently recall a very interesting statistic from Freakonomics: the single, traceable correlation between a child’s abilities in school and his home life are the number of books a family has in their home. I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve taken it to heart and I believe it to be true. A laptop is an interactive tool. An ebook, even if it’s just a glorified, dual screen laptop, is a reading tool. That is why tablet PCs never took off in the mainstream: people don’t know what to do with a form factor that is clearly not a laptop yet is also clearly a powerful computer. There is no way to connect the act of “scratching out words on a tablet” to processing worksheets in a spreadsheet. Why doesn’t the iPhone have handwriting recognition? Because it’s a horrible way to talk to a computer, even now.
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If the first OLPC XO laptop was considered a fashion item, just think how popular this thing will be. Of course, at the moment it’s only a little bit more real than fairy dust, and the idea that it will cost $75 in 2010 is laughable, but you have to admire the project’s ambition. At half the size of the original OLPC, the new XO DS (as I’m calling it) will sport dual touchscreens and draw only 1 watt of power.
Now, call me pessimistic, but something here is going to have to give. Either the price, the power, or the features will not be as described today. Still, it’s a sexy little device and possibly more practical than the original.
Picture jacked on short notice from HardOCP.
The XO Laptop (or the OLPC, whatever you want to call it) will now run Windows, giving children around the world the opportunity to dislike Microsoft as much as we do. I think we alluded to the sort of problems they’ll have in last week’s Sweater Friends. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the use of Windows “enhances [its] ability” to “transform education,” one BSOD at a time.
I don’t know, as a tech guy I’m supposed to applaud the program—hooray, computers in the third world—but I’m also supposed to hate M$. I really am torn.
Microsoft has unveiled a plan under which a somewhat crippled version of XP will be made available to the makers of low-cost PCs like the Eee PC and XO laptop. I’m not sure how I feel about this; at $25 it’s practically free, but the arbitrary hardware limitations Microsoft is imposing are, I think, kind of despicable:
the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs…the systems can have no more than 1G byte of RAM and a single-core processor running at no more than 1GHz.
Really? Single core? No touchscreens? Limiting the damn screen size? What Microsoft has just done is make sure that the most advanced UMPCs and low-cost computers won’t be running Windows. They’re trying to set up the low-cost PC as a separate market, and so it is, but they can’t simple draw a box around the hardware and say “fit this.” It’s not their job. And I really don’t think the Eee PC is going to cannibalize Vista sales, guys, so don’t worry about it.
I have no doubt this will grease the wheels and get more low-cost PCs to market and to the people who need them in developing countries, but at the same time it’s very much Microsoft playing 800-lb gorilla.
The XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project was originally supposed to make inroads into the developing world and low-income areas for the free and open source community. But OLPC’s founder thinks that the Sugar OS is scaring off investors and buyers alike. He says:
"One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."
Which is true, but I think that’s a bit disingenuous when you’re ostensibly trying to provide simple, efficient, and low-cost computing to people who’ve never seen a mouse before. He complains that Sugar doesn’t support the latest Flash framework, required for many children’s sites, but can’t they just push a patch out? I’d guess there’s a lot more to it than that, and a proven OS might draw a few more investors. Open Source and Linux are definitely entering the mainstream, but I think compromises like this will have to be expected for a long time to come.
