XO in Singapore

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was originally conceived as a means of promoting development in the Third World by putting US$100 laptops in the hands of children in developing countries. Along the way the founders of the project discovered the realities of economics and politics and decided to jump start their vision by offering Americans and Canadians the chance to donate a laptop to a child in the Third World for $199 and buy one for themselves at the same price.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071112-get-your-own-xo-laptop-olpc-give-1-get-1-project-underway.html

The good news was that 81,000 people donated. The bad news was that 81,000 people donated and OLPC's distribution system was overwhelmed, leading to a total breakdown of the customer support system and long delivery delays.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080125-olpc-angering-donors-give-1-get-1-some-day-probably.html

Personally, I'm a bit sceptical about the value of computers in education, especially in Third World countries which have more pressing needs like teachers and classrooms, but I liked the idea of a group of utopian visionaries willing to think out of the box and design cheaper, simpler computers instead of more powerful, more profitable computers, so I decided to support them by placing an order too. After all, if the government can commit $5 billion to a National Research Fund, I can give $550 to a group of idealistic researchers and get an innovative computer at the same time.

After a long delay and much time spent on hold on IDD calls, my XO laptop finally arrived.

First impressions

The laptop was smaller than I anticipated - 24 x 22 cm but fairly light, ~1.5 kg, with a 7.5 inch screen. 3 USB ports, an SD card reader and a built-in webcam but no optical drive. No hard drive either, instead it has 512 MB of flash memory. Puny specs by First World standards but adequate for basic tasks and web surfing provided you avoid multimedia-intensive websites.

Wi-fi is included, however, and it connected to my home network without any problem. One cool feature of the XO but which I was not able to try out because of a lack of other XO's is mesh networking.

The hardware package does seem robust and it looks as if the designers did put a lot of thought into designing a laptop that is able to withstand the rigours being handled by children in less than ideal environments. The use of flash memory instead of a hard drive, for example, was deliberate, to extend battery life and avoid having moving parts that could fail.

The laptop was also designed to be used as an ebook, and the display can be folded into a tablet form factor. The display also has a special ebook mode that is black and white but can be read in direct sunlight and supposedly gives extra long battery life.

Overall, I'd give than a B+ for the hardware package. A little bit low on the memory, but that's just a cost thing, and will certainly be taken care of as hardware prices drop. No way for memory on existing XO's to be upgraded, though.