Somehow, a twelve-year-old child has been given the opportunity to take the OLPC XO for a test drive, and we've got the blow-by-blow for you. The critic, named "SG," has spent a lifetime using computers, and claims that he / she had low expectations, but the XO took him / her "by surprise," calling the child-centric green laptop "cleverly designed, imaginative, [and] straightforward." The reviewer says that
Negroponte's pet-project is "great for first time users," and lauds the PCs games and camera, as well as the "application that allows you to type things." Unfortunately, it's not all cheers for the humanitarian computer, as the critic discovered that applications were slow to open, the system was prone to crashes, and the OS delivers no message before the battery loses charge. "I had to wait two minutes to get onto one application," he / she says, and "it got slower... the longer I went without rebooting it." In the end, however, SG gives the laptop high marks, concluding that the value, build quality, and bundled software outweigh the minor annoyances he / she had with the system, closing the review by simply stating, "This program is truly amazing."
posted August 10th 2007 3:31PM
it kinda sounds like a memory leak. like... it uses 10MB of ram, but only gives 8MB back and never lets you have it, even when you close the program. poor memory management... they shouldve gone linux XD
i do indeed have 2 of them at the office since we are the ones supporting the project here in Dominican Republic and yeah sometimes applications take a min or two to open but the bottom line here that the project will put computers with a descent behavior to let childs learn computers in a free computer!!
maybe they wont be able to play battlefield 2 or FEAR in that computer but they will indeed have the chance to explore the internet
i wish the author of this post said the version of software in that particular laptop cause there are loads of upgrades yet to be made to make it perfect
the big difference between the OLPC and people tho critisizes it, is that while they are saying we will fail, we are here trying to make this happend for real
its a lot easier say the whole thing is going to fail instead joining us to help developing countrys, like mine DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, to introduce poor kids (and their families) to new technology
visit http://www.laptop.org
MAKA
P.S.
if any of you want some good pics of the laptop working just let me know or email me to olpc@ciact.gov.do
once the kinks are worked out, it'll be nice. i just hope that the computers are taken care of and dont get stolen =O
trust me they are working on it, thats when the whole linux comunity comes to help :)
I don't want to sound like a showoff, but when I was 12 (2 years ago), I certainly did type like that. I knew advanced vocabulary, but I never talked like that in public b/c I didn't want to seem like some nerdy kid. So it actually is possible that a 12 year-old did say that
i just realized... the touchpad at the bottom looks VERY similar to the one in Apple's new patent... is apple patent trolling??
Slow for applications to load... Gets worse the longer it goes without a reboot...
Frequent crashes...
Bad user experience... (e.g. no low battery notifications)
Doesn't this thing run Linux?
Yeah, but linux sucks for the desktop. These things should run CE 6... I'm sure MS could waive most of the $5/copy embedded device licensing fee.
If they did it right and ported an old version of office (95?) and a VS CE IDE for .NET and a couple other things it could blow away the current OLPC software.
Even XP embedded is seriously reliable and can run said office/VS without any special work.
It's completely believable that a twelve year old could write a review like this. Those of you who are in disbelief are probably underestimating the capabilities of a twelve year old simply because you were unintelligent as a child and are unintelligent now.
This guys a noob when I was twelve I didn't call a word processor a typing program...