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.

Don’t look at me like that. I know, right? Yet another tablet entering the fray, and this one (claims Negroponte) will only cost $75. Well, that’s it then. Guess we can pack up the CrunchPad (bless its heart) and go home. Apple is probably quaking in its loafers as well, since the same latte-sucking Volvo-jockeys who want the Apple Tablet also love the idea of the OLPC. Charity and all that. Buy one, give one is a great promotion, and for a $75 unit, it’s a price most can afford. Assuming they hit that price target, of which there is no guarantee. On the other hand, Microsoft is probably happy that there’s one less dual-touchscreen device to compete with the Courier.

Here’s what Negroponte had to say about the XO 3.0 in a recent interview with Xconomy:

2.0 has been replaced by two things: 1) model 1.75, same industrial design but an ARM inside, 2) model 3.0, totally different industrial design, more like a sheet of paper… completely plastic and unbreakable, waterproof, 1/4″ thick, full color, reflective and transmissive, no bezel, no holes. 1W. $75, ready in 2012.

Sounds like a fantasy winner! He also notes that the OLPC program is splitting into a hardware arm and grassroots/education arm. The original XO will be updated with a new processor but will continue to ship pretty much as is. They’re also requesting that OLPC be changed to “olpc,” a demand I find onerous (and pointless).

What the device would actually be capable of is anybody’s guess, but a basic e-book reader and browser seems to be the minimum feature set. I’m torn between an affinity for traditional computing (which is probably fundamental to a modern education) and traditional education, which the XO 3.0 would most certainly make easier. As a commenter at Slashdot points out, “in any third-world country access to ‘open source’ text books on any subject at zero extra cost would be more important than the actual “educational computer” functionality.” Text books to be sure, not to mention the world’s literature and current events. The village library just got a lot bigger.

Whatever happens, we can’t expect it before 2012, which really renders discussion moot, seeing as the entire landscape of tech will have changed by then. So I guess the CrunchPad and Apple Tablet aren’t in danger just yet. Hell, we’ll probably be on version 3.0 ourselves by that time. But while the consumer tech market is a moving target, third-world literacy and grassroots education are always welcome. Even though Negroponte has pretty much said that this is a business endeavor and not a charitable one, it may yet do a lot of good.

[via SlashGear]

It’s still a prototype, but it’s looking promising. The builders have created a pedal power alternative to the hand cranks used on the standard OLPC, and it definitely makes sense to do so. The human body can certainly pedal easier then it can a crank, and the creators of the modification have stated that it’s easy enough to use that a 3rd or 4th grader can power it. Might be hard to type while you’re doing that, but at least you’ll have a full charge.

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.

The full instructions can be found here. You’ll basically need to download Sugar on a Stick in ISO form, then use Fedora LiveUSB Creator to “burn” the ISO to the USB thumb drive. Once that process is complete, stick the thumb drive in the old computer’s USB port and boot the machine up (make sure your BIOS is set to boot from USB).

Here’s a little demo video:

Sugar Labs Announces Immediate Availability of Sugar on a Stick; Learning Platform Runs on Any PC or Netbook In The Classroom [SugarLabs.org via Slashdot]

Like this video? View more here…

It’s not like the whole project has been scrapped, far from it, it just exposes the trouble of introducing something as radical as the XO laptop into a school system that isn’t prepared to handle it. Until the teachers consider exploratory learning as legitimate and are equipped to take advantage of the device, the project is doomed to failure. It’s the classic horse/water problem. So the new strategy simply has to include those considerations and work harder on the top-down learning model they have there — something proposed a long time ago but not really implemented. Here’s a talk discussing this and other things in more detail.

I wonder what the risk is of someone considering the XO-2 a toy. They’d probably be hard-pressed to categorize at all.

Update: Commenter Edward notes that this problem is not new, and that it has in fact been encountered and surmounted before. Glad to hear it.

[via Reddit, photo credit: CNET, it's in Nigeria]

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.

PC World interviewed the CEO of the OLPC India group, who stated that the laptops will go to about 1,500 schools. The bad news is that this isn’t going to help AMD, who had their CPU dropped in favor of the VIA C7-M chipset. The system memory has also been increased to 1 GB, and the internal storage has been bumped up to 4 GB. There are also rumors of a 2.0 model that should be revealed in 2010.

[via Ars Technica]

The ultimate goal would be to implement touch gestures on it as well, but chances are that having so many layers in a low-cost display would damage its durability and increase its cost. In the meantime, they can at least provide a common display for the Classmate and OLPC-style netbooks being shipped to needy communities. According to their site, we’re looking at a late-2009 or 2010 release date, and they sound like they’ve pretty much got it locked down. No shots or video, but hey.

Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the project, says:

The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google – we’ll want people to copy it. We’ll make the constituent parts available. We’ll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.

Sounds like the right approach to me. And if the pictures are to be believed, the clamshell dual-touchscreen thing may actually be a reality.

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.

This new model has dual touchscreens and replaces the earlier OLPC model. Apparently there is some question as to whether this will actually be made.

via NetBookNews

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.

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.

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.

I doubt the OLPC 2.0 will make it to market. Big players like Intel will step in or someone like ASUS will make an ultra-cheap laptop that isn’t really aimed at kids and start selling it — or create a system to donate it — to the very audience OLPC is after. But I believe something like the Kindle or this new OLPC is what is really needed in developing countries. Laptops can be confiscated and hijacked by bad regimes. EBooks can’t. When a device has no discernible purpose besides showing picture books and math problems — when it isn’t clearly a high-tech device — it can be used the way books are used in the home and at school rather than as something separate and tacked on to the pedagogical process. Kids don’t need to learn LOGO and run an MS Office clone. They need books that will spur the imagination to learn enough to use a real computer in a school computer lab. Kids games are garbage, for the most part, but interactive books and the written word are gold.

I’ve had lots of trouble with the OLPC project and while I agree that my thinking is backwards and crotchety, I’d much rather spend $5000 to train a teacher in a developing country than spend $500 on a crappy laptop. That’s just me.

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.

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.