XO-1

A dual-touch-screen XO-2 laptop was a fantastical concept. But it's nothing on One Laptop Per Child's XO-3, a dream of a tablet.

The concept design, via Fuse Project, is all semi-flexible plastic, multitouch, and backlit. It functions as a color-screen e-reader and a camera. It's thinner than an iPhone, waterproof, and $75.

In other words, it's everything people have been fantasizing about in a tablet--durable, thin, multitouch, and multiple-screen modes for computing and reading--but for just $75.

Nicholas Negroponte, head of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, wants it by 2012.

Remember, this is the organization … Read more

The One Laptop Per Child operating system is now available for free downloading for "any" PC or Netbook, according to its maker.

Sugar Labs, responsible for building the low-cost device's XO-1 operating system, released it online last week for loading onto any USB flash drive greater than 1GB.

Called "Sugar on a Stick v1," Sugar Labs hopes it will help spread the use of the OS in classrooms, without the need for the OLPC machine.

An IDC analyst said earlier this year that the OS would be one of the OLPC's more attractive aspects … Read more

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation … Read more

I learned about the new Give One, Get One program of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation the same way most people will--from a TV commercial sponsored by Amazon.com, which is handling order fulfillment for the new program through this page on Amazon's Web site.

Like last year's program, which I wrote about here before and after I bought one myself, the deal is simple: you buy two laptops for $399, and you get one. The other goes to a deserving student somewhere in the developing world. (This is why I sometimes call it the Buy 2, … Read more

I just saw an interesting piece over on the EE Times website (here) written by David Carey, president of Portelligent, an analyst firm well-known for doing teardowns of popular electronic products.

Here are some of the key points I learned from the article:

According to Portelligent, the LCD is pretty similar to previous transflective LCDs (that is, LCDs that can work from transmitted backlight or reflected ambient light) except for the arrangement of the color subpixels. I've seen nothing particularly remarkable about mine. It offers poor off-axis image quality, as I described in my first look (here), and doesn'… Read more

Last week, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization announced its new XO-2 laptop design, which will likely replace the XO-1 design I've written about before on this blog. There are images of the XO-2 on the OLPC wiki and a video clip from the announcement on Joanna Stern's blog for Laptop magazine.

The new design uses two touch-screen LCDs flanking a central hinge. This approach allows the unit to be used as a book with facing pages (shown here), as a conventional laptop using a virtual keyboard on the lower display, or as a single system shared … Read more

I like the Belkin company. I remember when Belkin was basically nothing but a cable company, and by that, I mean a company that makes electrical and optical cables. They made good cables, and still do.

But in recent years they have expanded into a wide variety of consumer products. I've always assumed Belkin's expansion was driven, at least in part, by the success of Monster Cable, which has made a lot of money selling expensive cables that (in my opinion, at least) are not always worth the price.

I imagine Belkin's engineering-oriented management deciding that selling … Read more

I'm a little late to the party with this unboxing of my new OLPC XO-1 laptop, but the machine arrived while I was out of town visiting my family for Christmas. In fact, there's a story there.

Before I left, I started hearing that people were receiving their XO-1's, and I realized that if mine didn't show up before I left, it would almost certainly arrive while I was gone. The OLPC people sent out no shipment notifications and didn't reply to several emails, so I had no way to delay the shipment or contact … Read more