OLPC’s XO: A Journalist’s Perfect Laptop?

Image by the OLPC Foundation. Distributed under CC2.5 License.

Probably not, but its eventual commercial successor will be.

Despite being a technophile, I’ve often said that my ideal cell phone would be a big antenna attached to an even larger battery; The proliferation of bells and whistles on your iPhones, e-Phones, and nPhones has obscured the core functionalities of the device–signal strength, battery life, and price.

The XO laptop is a core functional laptop, plus unbelievable ruggedness, minus price, plus a big karma boost. Manufactured by the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and designed by volunteer geeks around the world, the XO is supposed to change the world by supplying a valuable–but affordable–eduction resource to children in need.

Some key features of the laptop:

Power. A three-watt full consumption promised between four and fourteen hours of runtime. The batteries are NiMH, which means they should last for more charge cycles and be cheap to replace. The laptop can charge off exceptionally dirty power supplies and accept a wide range of voltages; a cheap solar panel or a wired car battery are both tested for.

Durability. Double thick plastic casing, water resistant keyboard, and zero moving parts. Not even a fan or hard drive. Huge, durable hinges and case locks. No exposed ports when not in use. No internal connectors or loose chips. This thing is designed to be tossed around by children for years in a desert without maintenance.

Dual mode screen. This is the big one. There’s a pretty bad low-power color screen, but dim it all the way and it becomes an ultra high resolution (200 DPI!) black and white reflective monitor. That means that it’s meant to be used in bright sunlight, where normal laptop screens are hard to read. It also means that in reflective mode, it should have a comparable resolution to high-end magazine printing, and virtually no power consumption. You can flip the monitor around and it becomes an ebook, basically.

Silent operation. Once again, no moving parts.

Wireless. Tradeoffs were made–less top speed, more top range, less power consumption.

Karma. In the grey, grey world we live in, buying an XO is undeniably a good thing. Why? Because the only way for an American to get one is to buy two. One goes to you, the other goes to help educate a third world child. That’s why it’s $400 for a $200 machine.

The big downside is the non-standard operating system. It can’t run aperature, lightroom, photo mechanic, photoshop, office, or any other windows or osx only programs. It does run Firefox, however, and that–along with access to Google Apps and Google Docs, is all I truly need. It also has very limited space on the solid state hard drive, so it’s not for storing photographs (unless you attach an external hard drive to it first). It has a limited purpose for me, and I think it might fill it well.

I’ll let you know when mine arrives. You can buy one-two if you want to. That’s not a typo, it’s a pun.

New York Times Review
Wikipedia for the numbers

Image by the OLPC Foundation. Distributed under CC2.5 License.