Aaron Landry

XO Laptop, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I met up with Mike Lee in Washington to test out his development XO Laptop.

If you’re not familiar with the XO Laptop or the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, from laptopgiving.org:

The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege.

Mike has been testing with a development unit for awhile. The first thing I noticed is that it is very small and confusing to open the first time. Once I knew that the WiFi antennas, or “ears,” pop up first (they act as a lock) it opens quite easily.

It boots fairly quickly with 256mb of RAM and opens to a screen where I have what feels like an OS X Dock at the bottom to choose applications. After about 10 minutes I felt really comfortable getting around it and everything worked in a rather simple manner.

Browsing was about as fast as the iPhone on WiFi and there were a few music creation applications that I didn’t spend the time to figure out. I tested out the RSS reader on it as well and it was pretty swift.

One of the most interesting things about the XO Laptop to me is in the collaboration features. It creates mesh networks on its own with other XO Laptops and will share a common internet connection, which is very useful in remote areas. In the absence of internet connectivity, it will share resources with the other laptops. Teachers can share information to other laptops live and students can then take them home and share the information and pages with their families and others.

They’ll also take a wide and dirty range of power to charge it. You can use things such as a solar panel, a foot pump or hand crank in addition to using a normal power adapter.

I ordered one through the Give One, Get One program a week and a half ago. You order two. One gets shipped to you and one gets donated. I can’t wait to play around with it more. UPDATE: On 15 Dec 07 I got my own OLPC XO Laptop.

See more photos from my Washingtontrip as well as Mike’sphotos from when we met up.