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December 21, 2007
Our OLPC Arrived Today
Our One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) device arrived in the mail today. We participated in the Give One Get One campaign (we bought two; one was sent to us and the other was donated to a developing area of the world somewhere).
After less than an hour with it, I'm pretty amazed at the hardware that's packed into this little guy, especially for the price of <$200. Sure, the processor is a little slow for handling complex Flash-enabled websites, and you won't win any speed races initiating apps, but it has just an amazing mesh Wi-Fi interface (which allows instant sharing amongst other OLPCs of most activities on any one of them), an embedded webcam, and a whole host of pre-installed applications (from a music mixer to drawing to a web browser to a journal/notebook and so on).
I'm not sure it is a better solution for a kid's school laptop if that kid has access to regular electricity and his/her parents can scrape up the cash for an Asus EeePC or cheapie Dell (I just saw one in a flyer for <$370), but as it was designed for children in third-world countries, I think it should be a great fit for any kid 5+ who wants to just explore what computers can do.
Update: I just noticed that our unit does not have the two "keyboard LEDs" shown in the above pic. I wonder why not...they'd be handy for nighttime 'puting.
Posted by Craig in Computing
and Mobile & PDAs
and Society / Politics
and Technology
Comments
Neat. I thought about loading Sugar onto the kid's laptop (one of my wife's old laptops) but it didn't seem all that stable.
Posted by: Bob at January 3, 2008 12:40 PM