OLPC XO goes into mass production

It's been hit by a few delays, but the OLPC XO has finally gone into mass production. According to Mass High Tech, that long-awaited event officially got underway yesterday morning at Quanta Computer's brand new manufacturing facility in Changshu, China, which is just a two-hour jaunt northwest of Shanghai (in case anyone's planning on doing some sight-seeing). While that's a little later than the original estimate of October that Quanta gave when it first began to gear up for production way back in July, it's actually a few days earlier than the company's most recent indication of a start date, which it had pegged as November 12th just last month. Now, let's just hope this begins the road down to something closer to that mythical $100 price tag.

[Frank @ Nov 6th 2007 2:14PM]

My question is: with a lot of other computer manufacturer's coming out with cheaper and cheaper laptops and internet portables, is the XO still relevant, and if so, for how long?

http://www.theblurgh.com

[thekid @ Nov 6th 2007 3:08PM]

With all due respect your question is stupid.
I'm not going to sugar coat an answer for a question like that here.
I'm not sure how anyone who reads engadget still doesn't grasp the concept of the OLPC.

It doesn't matter how cheap "other" laptops get. Price is merely half (if that) of what the XO is about. You really don't have to study the ins and outs of XO to understand what makes this different from "other" laptops. Again I'll list some of the headlines.

Hand powered
Extremely low power consumtion
Mesh networking even when pc is not on
Touch screen with tablet mode
Durable estimated lifetime of five years in harsh eviroments
Open source
Learning friendly
etc...
Seriously information about this is not hard to come by. In the time it takes to post a question you could have learned your answer in 3 clicks.

[Gary @ Nov 7th 2007 12:56AM]

"Touch screen with tablet mode", just wanted to (I think) correct this one point. The screen is not touch sensitive, though it does flip around, hiding the keyboard, and into an ebook style format (fully daylight readable in a high resolution monochrome, or a lower resolution colour with backlight on) with a set of game like buttons to interact with it. Regarding touch, the track pad has a regular centre zone for normal mousing, but is kind'a triple width across the bottom to support stylus input to allow for hand writing practice and drawing input. It's a very innovative piece of kit, I do hope some of the ideas are adopted into the mainstream, and wish it all the best.

[silverblackvoid @ Nov 6th 2007 2:25PM]

dont wanna eee pc. can i have a XO instead.

[TIMMAH! @ Nov 6th 2007 3:07PM]

Okay, which would you rather (and why.) EeePC at $199 or OLPC XO at $100?

[jus10 @ Nov 6th 2007 3:57PM]

The eee pc. Its actually useful for something.

[Frank @ Nov 6th 2007 3:17PM]

I must disagree, thekid. If I were interested in providing am inexpensive computer for school children in my country, I would think about cost as well as how well it will prepare them to compete in the global market. While Sugar OS is interesting, how well will it prepare children for a windows-dominant world?

If you find a discussion like this below you, please take the high road and don't respond.

[thekid @ Nov 6th 2007 4:23PM]

See the problem is non-techcentric people get a lot of their tech related information from the people they know that are techcentric. Information (or misinformation) spreads from there. So it's difficult to "take the high road" and ignore the misconceptions surrounding the OLPC here since there's a good chance people reading here will be providing information to others later. And every time there's a post about the OLPC, inevitably there are comments about used dells and or black friday.
So I'd like to think by correcting the misconceptions here there'll be less misconceptions to the public at large.

Again while cost plays part of a large roll of the XO you have to keep in mind that the features are vastly different than an ordinary laptop and therefor they shouldn't be compared on the cost aspect as if they were the same.

As far as the OS goes. Seeing as these are primarily education based laptops, I'm not aware of any setbacks that come from learning on a windows alternative when you have little to no experience with computers period. I don't believe the learning curve would be much bigger going from Sugar to Windows as opposed to nothing to Windows.

[Will @ Nov 6th 2007 3:48PM]

Question: Where is all of the funding for this whole project coming from, anyway? the UN?

[Tim Quernemoen @ Nov 6th 2007 4:16PM]

At the end of the year they should take a poll for the most over reported story of the year. The OLPC would win hands down for this year and the last few years.

Why doesn't engadget just create a blog for the OLPC?
It could be just like Engadget Mobile, but with daily OLPC news!

[Ian H. @ Nov 6th 2007 6:02PM]

iPhone?

[Narmeen @ Nov 7th 2007 11:42AM]

Has anyone heard rumors about the delay in release of the XO?