Initial Impressions Of My OLPC XO
My One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop arrived unexpectedly two days ago, and I've done little more than play around with it so far. I've fired it up, filled in my name, and gotten it briefly on the Internet via Wi-Fi.
Mostly I've marveled at it for the technological achievement that it represents. For $200, there are some amazing breakthroughs in a computing device:
- The overall price - even without achieving the desired $100 price point, it's still a remarkable achievement that a complete (self-contained, including screen, battery, enough memory and storage to be usable out of the box) computing device could be built at all for the ~US$180 price point.
- Three USB ports mean that you can probably adapt it to do nearly anything desired. It might not be the zippiest "server", but you can connect it to Ethernet, external drives, etc.
- Additional storage is easy to the point of trivial with the SD slot; I think you can get SD cards up to 8 GB right now - that's plenty of internal storage and you can access a lot more through a network or external drive if needed.
- Based on Linux, of course. One of the things I intend to do is to mostly use it as a standalone "Linux appliance" and eventually adapt it / "corrupt it" to my particular requirements.
- It's rugged... finally, we have a laptop that we can just chuck into the backpack without extraordinary padding.
- I really like that it "just eats 12 volts Direct Current" for power; that will make it easy to use for my Amateur Radio experiments that I plan with it.
- The ablity to rotate the screen and "tabletize" it is really amazing. It looks to me like it will make a perfectly acceptable eBook reader.
- Keyboard notwithstanding, it's the right size - it's easy to carry, it's light enough and small enough to carry with you most places if you're at all inclined to bring a notebook, backpack, etc.
Recent Comments