Give One Get One Redux, OLPC XO-1 Now On Amazon 168
404 Clue Not Found writes "The One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1 laptop is once again available to the general public via its Give One Get One promotion, where $400 will buy two laptops, one for the purchaser and one for 'a child in the emerging world.' Having learned from their delivery and fulfillment headaches the first time around, this time they partnered with Amazon.com to handle shipping. But a year after its initial release, the market has become saturated with Eee-wannabe netbooks from every major manufacturer. Can the XO-1's charitable appeal, unique chassis and dual-mode screen compete with the superior performance and standard operating systems of its newer peers?"
Keyboard (Score:5, Informative)
Other than that it's a perfectly comparable to other sub-notebooks. Obviously twice the price of what it should be, but it's extremely light and rugged. It's the ideal machine for anyone wanting to run linux, since the entire machine is completely open, including the BIOS. The dual-mode screen could really be useful for if you want to work outside one day, which is pretty much impossible with my T60.
Re:Charitable appeal? (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft has some of hot air and one pilot project in Peru vs. plenty of XO deployments with Sugar (including the same Peru where main government-backed deployment uses Sugar).
Re:If they just sold the thing for $200... (Score:1, Informative)
If you haven't touched it in 9 months, then try upgrading to Release 8.2 [laptop.org] and enabling the automatic power management [laptop.org] (via homeview->control panel->power).
They've made some other usability strides in past 9 months too - Firefox3 is in the G1G1 activities set, and the activities have an auto updater.
Re:If they just sold the thing for $200... (Score:3, Informative)
The LCD in a normal room-lit situation with backlight on isn't really all that pretty, the resolution is ok, but its heavily depended on the viewing angle, which can annoy quite a bit, due to the pixel layout it also has a diagonal grid all over it, which can irritate. In sunlight its a different thing of course, resolution is great and its very readable, not quite ePaper-like, but close enough, the viewing angle problem and the diagonal grid disappear when not backlit.
The OS on the other side isn't really all that great. The basic concepts are overall nice, but its still far from unfinished and feels like an early beta more then a finished product. It also lacks support for almost anything that you would expect from a "normal OS", you don't even have a normal file system unless you go to the Terminal and bypass all the UI. Its also not very fast and the battery life is rather crappy, you get 3 hours out of it and thats it. The hardware does have some interesting power saving features which might help with that a bit in the future, but its still not finished and was disabled by default the last time I checked. The software still isn't quite up to all the cool features that you heard in talks two years ago.
All that said, its still a great little machine, but $400 its quite a bit of money and you can get better hardware for that.
Re:If they just sold the thing for $200... (Score:3, Informative)
There's something out there with the same LCD technology
Not that I'm aware of, although former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen has been planning to commercialize the LCD technology she developed.
And it's worth pointing out that it's not so much that the display has amazing quality, but rather that the display has amazing quality given the low manufacturing cost -- in backlit mode, i.e. all the time except in direct sunlight, the XO-1's 1200x900 (sub)pixel display is noticeably more artifacty than a similarly-sized 800x600 conventional display.
and an OS written specifically for the hardware by Red Hat
Saywhat? OLPC machines (at least those not burdened with Windows) run a nearly-stock Fedora Linux kernel. The GUI, Sugar, is essentially an alternative to Gnome/KDE and was written (in Python?!?!) by OLPC project team members, who may or may not have day jobs with Red Hat.
in order to maximize battery life?
While the hardware potential for extreme battery life exists in the XO-1 hardware, firmware/software support has lagged. I've updated to the latest stable release, and I can still only get a few hours of active use out of a battery charge.
1200 x 900 = Best screen for the size / money (Score:1, Informative)
Before everyone gripes about how lousy a deal the XO is now that the netbooks are out, remember its screen: 1200x900 is a lot more pixels. Mind you, yes, crammed into a much smaller area so the aging-eyes set won't like it, but this is a great machine to use to remote into a bigger, better box elsewhere - and have a reasonably viewable screen in the process.
I've seen netbooks with 10" screens sporting 1024 x 600. That resolution is, like, so 1998.