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.
