OLPC rundown: XO gets naked, project detailed

We still haven't seen anything beyond BTest-2 of OLPC's impending XO laptop, but Jürgen Rink over at heise mobil has an in-depth rundown of the project, the laptop and the competition. There's much to be said, eight pages of it, in fact, but Jürgen provides some interesting insights into what sets the XO's tech apart from current laptops and other entrants in the educational laptop space. He also makes it quite clear that the XO has a ways to go, with power consumption -- which Nicholas Negroponte is targeting at 2 watts -- currently ranging from 6.5 to 9.1 watts, and the battery life at 2.5 to 3.5 hours falls far short of the projected 10 hours. Also MIA is the back light sensor, and that much talked about pull-string power generator hasn't even hit prototype stages yet. There are concerns that the convertible display hinge will prove to fragile under heavy use, and software holes like security and missing apps will need to be fixed before the laptop is ready for prime time. That said, the laptop provides some pretty interesting advancements in the realm of hardware and software, with notables like the reflective display, mesh networking, stylus-friendly trackpads and the "kids teach themselves" concept differentiating the XO from edu-PC wannabes. The project still hasn't reached its moment of truth, when verbally-committed governments have to start ponying up cash, but the first order of business is wrapping development on the XO, and we look forward to peeping the final product.

[Eric Chiu @ May 11th 2007 12:53PM]

You are right. what's the point for CHILD only laptop, where the most productive (16-30) is excluded. Also, OLPC doesn't count China in... LOL... one laptop per child ignores the largest group of children.

[Eric Chiu @ May 11th 2007 12:51PM]

After being disappointed again and again i decided to come up with my own approach towards a cheap-top for public. check out http://blog.sinnovate.net

[Rick @ May 11th 2007 1:34PM]

Not another blurb about the OLPC - YUCK!!!!

[Jacob Magnusson @ May 11th 2007 3:03PM]

Well it's a fact that children are MUCH better learners...

[l2k @ May 11th 2007 5:58PM]

And what does having a laptop have to do with learning? The most brilliant humans that ever lived, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein didn't have laptops. That didn't seem to hold them back much.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ May 12th 2007 1:21AM]

FROM THE ARTICLE:
"Data can be stored on a school computer via WLAN. The OLPC plans to provide such a server with 330 gigabytes of memory for roughly 100 US dollars. Unfortunately, the first such server has yet to be seen. Few schoolchildren live near their school; most live near other schoolchildren. So the developers came up with something clever for wireless connections between XOs via WLAN: the WLAN chips operate as a mesh, with each laptop passing on data for others. Less infrastructure is needed in such mesh networks; in extreme cases, all that is needed is a single WLAN base station to get all of the schoolchildren connected to the Internet."

330 Gigabytes of RAM for $100! Wow, where can I get a server that cheap!

[kyle allen @ May 13th 2007 1:40AM]

woot! its got an amd processor!!!! i cant wait till we start seeing these things in goodwill display cases!

[ug @ May 14th 2007 2:37AM]

They started R&D on this before the technology was ready. This is a UMPC and Intel is already tooling smaller micron processors specifically to boost runtimes on UMPCs. By going with AMD, they are using a woefully underpowered chip and still not likely to meet their desired power consumption goals. If you read the article, they haven't met them yet and I'm not sure what they can do to bridge the gap with their existing architecture. If they can not get an all-day runtime on the battery it will be an engineering failure.

[Samuel Bayliss @ May 14th 2007 6:15AM]

There is a pretty-decent FPGA (Altera Cyclone II) in that picture!! An FPGA of that class is useful for much more than just glue logic - With the proper integration of those reconfigurable logic resources (with software) this machine could have some really interesting applications that are just not possible with 'conventional' laptops. If only it had an ARM applications processor (hint) in it rather than the AMD x86 monster.