I got my XO Laptop shipped via FedEx this morning. In the box was the laptop itself, a battery, a charger and two sheets of paper, one of them being a thank you note from Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and CEO of One Laptop per Child and the other simply shows how to open the laptop, what the ports are and a short description of the home and neighborhood views. There’s no other documentation.
This is my second time with one of these, the first being in DC with Mike. The first things I’ve noticed right away compared to the pre-production unit I played with: the logo color on the top is different, the applications and interface feel a bit more refined and the applications feel a bit snappier.
I was reminded that it is small. Even my small cat thinks its small.
I’ve also (finally) had two very, very important things sink into me when working with these devices. First, I needed to remove my initial conceptions and expectations on what a laptop is and what it’s used for. For example, the first time I played with one the two applications I initially opened were the web browser and RSS reader. While web browsing and RSS work fine on the laptops, it’s not exactly the primary reason why these laptops exist. Secondly, I’ve learned to realize that these were truly designed for very young children from the ground up, not for adults using adult software and existing ideas on how interfaces should work. For example, Nicholas Deleon wrote at CrunchGear that the idea of porting Windows XP to this laptop “gives [it] an air of legitimacy.” I was so disappointed in his post showing how little some people understand the XO Laptop’s purpose.
What is it’s purpose? The XO Laptop was created as a tool for children for spreading information, learning and collaborating with others, especially in countries and remote areas where technology and educational materials are sparse. Likely, many of the kids that use an XO Laptop have not used a web browser before, let alone an RSS reader (or the necessity to be compatible with Microsoft Windows).
Opening up and booting my new XO Laptop for the first time lead me put in my name and then to choose my avatar’s color scheme. It then put me on the home view where you can choose activities to load from the bottom, similar to an OS X dock. On the top right of the screen as well as the keyboard are four icons that are a way of navigating. On the far left is the neighborhood view, which shows your laptop in comparison to everything else it sees on the network. The next is the group icon, which shows other laptops you are collaborating with. Next is home, which shows your laptop and the activities it is running. Finally, the far right button is activity, which shows your current running application.
Moving your mouse cursor at any time in any of the four corners of the screen brings up a frame containing those four icons at the top as well as the available activities at the bottom to load another application.
The bundled activities have a wide range of depth including Memorize, which is a simple memory game to programming languages such as one similar to Logo called TurtleArt and Pippy, a front-end for coding in Python. There’s also some other applications for building other games and programs from scratch which are currently way over my head. I thought about the appropriateness for such a young age for awhile and then remembered when I started writing my own code: at age 5 on an Atari 800XL. I realized that many people my age that are involved with technology now started by writing stuff on machines like that or others such as the Commodore 64. Man, learning languages is a lot easier to pick up at that age. 
Bundled as well is a very simple application for playing live music and another for recording audio and video. There’s a more advanced application for sequencing music too. There’s a basic calculator that has advanced algebraic functions, a word processor, chat application and a number of other applications including a full terminal (deep down it runs a stripped down version of Fedora Linux). Again, the applications really do range from extremely basic to advanced. A lot more applications are in development.
The key ingredient to making the XO Laptop work, in my opinion, is its collaboration features. The XO Laptop is designed to build its own mesh networks, and most of the applications are designed to communicate and share information with other laptops on those networks. For example you can have a project that was built on one laptop, and immediately share it with all the other laptops on the network. The mesh networks will also share an internet connection if it’s available.
Also a teacher or a school can have a server that delivers information to all the laptops when kids are near, and they can then take that information home to their communities and families and share it. The future of how books in classrooms and information is spread really gets my gears turning on the possibilities of these devices… and this is just version 1.0.
My XO Laptop came with a US AC outlet charger, but the port is designed to take a very wide range of power sources for charging the battery. Foot pumps, hand cranks and solar panel grids are possibilities.
I’ve had a few hiccups with it so far. For example, while it seemed to see a ton of wireless networks in my area, I had a hard time staying connected to my home WiFi. I couldn’t get WiFi working at all at the Town Talk Diner but could use it fine from my phone. Also, when the screen is folded back there were times where it would cause the mouse cursor to move by rubbing against the trackpad underneath.
Peter Fleck asked what I plan on doing with the laptop. Honestly, I don’t know. I support the One Laptop per Child project and wanted to donate one through the Give One. Get One. program. That was my primary reason for getting one. I can’t see myself using this as a normal laptop by any means as it isn’t really designed to be really fast or use a lot of applications simultaneously. It doesn’t match up with my device habits currently so I don’t know in what capacity I’ll use it. I don’t plan on writing applications for it. Also, the browsing speed is comparable to my iPhone on WiFi. I’ll probably tinker more and learn more of the applications. It’s only my first couple hours and I’ll be diving into it further. Honestly though, I think it’s possible that when I’m done telling everyone I know about the project in the next few months I’ll donate it to an organization that will have more use for it than I will.
See more photos with my OLPC tag on Flickr.
Comments 16
Do you think it makes a decent e-book reader and field-network-tester? Those were the 2 main functions I was thinking of getting one for. (Besides for coding/hacking on). The main disappointments that are currently preventing me from obtaining one are that it has no touch screen when in e-book mode, only the buttons; and there is no wired rj45 port (I suppose I’d just have to get a usb nic).
That signal analyzer app is pretty impressive though.
Posted 16 Dec 2007 at 03:35 ¶Yeah, mine arrived yesterday too. I’m pretty excited about them but I haven’t gotten very far. One thing that I’ve noticed is that the mouse-pad on the one that I’ve unboxed seems defective — it jumps to the lower-right (usually) corner in frequencies varying from occasionally annoying to unusable.
I’m also not sure what I’m going to do with them. My kids are six and thirteen but we have lots of other computing options in the house. So I’m interested to just observe what they make of the XOs. I’m also excited to see what the hacker/dev community creates for them.
I feel like I should develop software for this thing. I’m write apps for a living and I spent eight years at university studying education. I almost feel obliged! But I’m also notoriously bad at getting stuff done outside of my current time commitments — so we’ll see if this goes anywhere. (It would help to justify the ‘investment’ that I’ve made.)
Posted 16 Dec 2007 at 07:19 ¶I would hope that you use your laptop to help OLPC and others who might be less technology savvy. At least you could share your XO First Impressions with those of us less fortunate.
Posted 16 Dec 2007 at 14:24 ¶what do you think of its use if I get one for my 7 yr old?
heck for that matter my 4yr old??
shoot me an email if you think I should or not…
been debating on it for a while now.
thanks.
Posted 16 Dec 2007 at 19:59 ¶I got mine on the 15th also (and posted about it on my blog as well). I was wondering if you got the email or PIN number for the T-Mobile hotspot access. I didn’t.
Posted 17 Dec 2007 at 09:21 ¶I’ve recently recieved my XO laptop. It’s interesting, but I’m not sure it’s good enough for kids in the first world. For one thing, it’s not running an OS that you’d want them to use later on. As they’ll probably later want a Windows or Mac OS machine. The second thing I’d say about it is it’s a bit slow when trying to open up bigger files like larger PDF files for ebook reading. It’s way slower than a Ibook G4 in opening up a PDF ebook for example. It might take 30 seconds to 2 minutes to open up a PDF file by the reader.
You open up PDF books from the Journal, not the write application. Write can rarely handle a PDF file. I found it will open up some word files, the more complex ones might present some problems.
As an EBOOK reader, once the book is loaded, it seems pretty nice. But it doesn’t have a touch screen, which of course is a bit beyond it’s actual marketed audience. YOu can use the buttons on the front to read and scroll thought the Ebook. First zoom using a mouse under VIEW, to the proper size then scroll away.
YOu can reorient your book and scroll as well, but currently the scroll buttons stay in the original orientation and don’t match the new screen (left, right or upside down) orientation possible.
So I’ve found that for me the best solution is to have a small optical mouse and use a scroll wheel on it while in ebook mode. Or keep it oriented in the normal screen mode and use the front buttons.
Sometimes I’ve had the browser or read application quit unexpectedly when pressing one of the zoom buttons. Maybe the machine thinks I’m trying to end the application by having the pointer near the top corner. I’m not sure what that’s about.
In Ebook mode, it seems to display only one or two pages of the PDF at a time, it will scroll and “load” each page as you get to it. This is okay for casual reading. For quick moving up and down and searching though the ebook, it might be a little on the slow side. I’m looking at ebooks that are image and size intensive.
Sometimes when launching the ebook or looking at a PDF the application will just hang and not launch. Perhaps I’m using something that’s not the right format filewise when this happens.
There are power limits on what the USB buss can support. I’m not sure if this is what causes the strange mouse activity that happens sometimes. The jumping around mouse. I read that this happened in some test machines when the battery was below 50%. It seems that if the battery is low I’ve experienced this a bit more.
The browsing on an open WIFI channel, who knows what goes on when you start the thing up. At first it seems the machines don’t want to browse, I found in my first XO after registering my machine the browser started to work. (Local home browser). I could see the network earlier but not browse at Panara bread.
I’m thinking it iwll work now.
Sometimes the machine seems to go into a long delay. This can be frustrating. I found write will hang if I choose to insert a picture just choosing the insert picture menu item. The first time I used write it seemed to work okay. I may need to have a picture on the clipboard first to do this. I’m not sure what that flacky activity is about.
I actually bought four XO’s to get two to insure I could play and test the mesh networking with my own machines. I haven’t been able to share, chat or get anywhere with the mesh other than see the other machine and initaiate a chat without having the chat session work. I’m doing something wrong there, and hope to “learn my way around the problem”.
Finding out the reader works with PDF’s and that this thing can open up word documents is a big plus.
I haven’t loaded the free Pepper OS on it and read about a different user bricking his machine when trying Pepper on the production XO he just got in the mail. I’ll hold off on Pepper until someone else figures that out. Don’t want to brick a machine and not be able to restore it.
Would like to know how to have a base copy of the XO software. Even a backup of my XO’s configuration on a USB key. I suppose I could copy all the files to a USB key and that would kind of be a backup of the software. I’m going to read more about that on the OLPC support site and figure out more about that before doing anything with Pepper.
It’s a very interesting toy and geek gadget. I had one lady ask me for a card when she saw me play with the laptop. I said I didn’t have any documentation and told her to Google XO laptop. She wanted to know about “donating” to the OLPC foundation as a “non profit” through her work payroll deduction. I said I’m sure you can donate, but chances are it probably doesn’t appear on most Payroll deduction plans as a list of a donor site.
That’s it for now.
My real interest about this is in studying long term ways to have a digital library that’s dependable and low energy footprint. It’s very hard to beat an XO from an energy footprint perpsective. In my thoughts toward “survivalism” of Peak Oil. I think about different configurations, when the first world, becomes more like the third world. The XO is in some ways an interesting “survival” grab the bag and go, type of device. It could fit nicely into a long term plan of low energy footprint for most browser and reading needs.
I have a Seagate 100 gig hard drive USB with two plugs, one is powered by the USB (green) side. I was able to power and get stuff off that. So a cheap USB 100 gig drive will work with the XO as a futuristic Ebook survival low footprint library. Imagine having thousands of books and your charger in a small briefcase that is sturdy for all types of possible long term reading and low energy use.
The Mesh network fits nicely into “survival” and “low energy footprint” thoughts as well. You can actually have your own peer to peer mesh learning environment with these. Which would be a huge plus in countries where kids might not be able to always travel outside their huts to go to school. They can network and do school activities from the safety of their home. This is a huge benefit for the third world and would fit into small eco-village styled green low footprint living in the USA as well. (I’m talking about more like organic 2090 living, than today.)
But now I’m leaving the thoughts of the XO as a reader gadget which is more along the lines of the earlier posts.
Posted 17 Dec 2007 at 10:12 ¶The PIN for T-mobile will be sent to your regular email address later by OLPC corp.
Posted 17 Dec 2007 at 10:18 ¶My XO laptop arrived via fedex yesterday.
I experienced the jumpy mouse problem when I first started using it; but, after an overnight charge, it seems to have disappeared.
IMPRESSIONS:
CONS: The keyboard is nearly useless for anyone with hands larger than an 8yo (maybe this should be in PROS section); Larger PDFs are sloooooooow.
PROS:
– eBook mode;
– Black and White no-backlit monitor mode (beautiful in its simplicity);
– Collaborative, easy-to-use OS (with uber-nerd Linux underneath);
– Networking-centric experience
– two USB ports (add mouse and keyboard to have user input in eBook mode)
Like other posters, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. I think it would be useful as an eBook reader/back-up/rugged laptop (leave it in the trunk of my car) or to simply donate back to XO. If they haven’t already initiated this program, they should seriously look into it…
I’ve also been trying to get some of the developers that I work with to get excited about it — it would be fun and meaningful to build an app for it. I just don’t know what the target audience wants/needs! It’ll be interesting to read some of the case studies once it reaches critical mass…
Posted 18 Dec 2007 at 08:18 ¶This is a great idea. I really hope the XO Laptop is as good in implementation as in concept.
What do you mean by “and the applications feel a bit snappier.”?
Have they improved the hardware or some sort of OS/application management since your first user experience?
This is a very exciting concept for collaborative classroom work.
Posted 19 Dec 2007 at 00:26 ¶I live in Uruguay, the first coubtry in buying these laptops for all school childrens and school teachers (400,000 people). But the XO laptops for adults are frustrating. We need a decent graphical file manager. We need a printer autodetection and configuration. We need more compatibility with MS Word: RTF files created in XO seems like garbage in MS Word. We need information about what was wrong: the XO hangs frequentrly without any message. For same money (U$S 200 each) my government almost buy a Classmate with XP. Once experienced the XO, I think that for school teachers the Classmate is much better.
Posted 21 Dec 2007 at 15:41 ¶I want to agree with the last post. I got mine few days back and have multiple problems:
- I cannot save files in either Writer or Browser
- many linux commands do not work in Terminal, including -man-
Bottom line is that for kids it is a decent “interface” but I think the authors forgotten that the teachers need to have the ability to program this thing. You need to install applications for particular tasks, etc. You need to manage the files to clean it. You need to backup what’s on it. Otherwise, it is just a toy for kids that do not grow with them.
In the end I started thinking about installing one of the live linux distributions on it, say Mandriva 2008 live. I just do not understand why they did give an option to start a laptop in a standard KDE-like mode. After all every laptop has to have a way for the administrator to with it and the graphical interface is too limited for it, whereas the available commands are pretty limited as well.
Finally, I am afraid that such a great idea may end up giving wrong impression in the end. If they get it wrong, it will take a long time for similar projects to really take hold in the future. So in the future someone may really know how to get it right, but because it was done wrong first, no body would listen, or least least it would take a lot of effort for people to to listen.
I wish them luck and I will use my laptop to keep in the car to occasionaly check email or write text – notes. It can do it sufficietly well. But I am afraid that there is a possibility the whole project will go nowhere.
Andrew
Posted 24 Dec 2007 at 02:36 ¶Python, eh? I’d almost consider getting one then.
How’s the language localization too? I haven’t kept up with their wiki, but maybe you can check… How’s the Guaraní support?
Seems like a decent machine for coding from somewhere when you just want ssh access and something to type on.
Posted 25 Dec 2007 at 01:28 ¶http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/12/24/laptop.village.ap/index.html
Posted 26 Dec 2007 at 18:32 ¶Received mine. 11 year old foster child absolutely in heaven. Myself – have a vaio laptop, an ibook G4 and a G5 desktop – - but the joy in her having her very own has given her the ability and JOY of exploring and experimenting.
I was all for the program it was designed for when I signed up; and I am seeing what they saw, right in front of me as well.
Posted 30 Dec 2007 at 01:55 ¶You guys got to try using jabber (an IRC client). This allows the XO to see all the logged/chatting sessions!
Posted 04 Jan 2008 at 19:28 ¶The command to issue in the terminal activity is `sugar-control-panel -s jabber xochat.org`.
It is truly amazing.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/05/one.laptop.per.child/index.html
Posted 05 Mar 2009 at 17:21 ¶Post a Comment