Hands-on with One Laptop Per Child's XO

There's been quite a fuss made over the XO, developed by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The OLPC vision was to design a low-cost, but powerful connected PC in order to provide kids all over the world with Internet power. OLPC wants to sell the XO in bulk to third-world countries.

After two years of heavy-duty publicity, the XO finally went into production this week. On the web, educators from all over the world are debating the efficacy of XO's answer to low-cost computing. Recently the company announced that beginning next week, it'll offer two XOs for $399, asking families to buy one and give one to a child in another country.

Thanks to two swell guys at a conference (Scott Traylor at 360Kid and Warren Buckleitner), I got to spend quite a bit of time with the XO this week. It sure does give you something to talk about.

At first glance, it looks about as garish as those plastic-y toys with chips from companies like LeapFrog and VTech. According to the site, the brightly colored X and O on the cover of the computer are supposed to look like a body inside a mind, but to me, it looked like a game of bingo. Call me crazy, but I expected a PC that was out to change the world to have a bit more gravitas.

Next, I found out that you need to be either Hercules or Houdini to open the case of the XO. Three of us sat there idiotically poking and stabbing at things, but the clamshell seemed to have a death grip. Finally, someone discovered the key: Locating the big green antennas on the side and flipping them up releases the entire machine.

The keypad—a lime-green membrane keypad—feels great, even though it has some bizarrely labeled keys unique to the OLPC. The keyboard is pleasantly quiet, waterproof, and responsive. The display technology is unique. In a clever move, the screen has two modes: one for sunlight (monochrome) and one for color (color). Even the networking on this machine has character. The XO uses 802.11, but with the addition of a special mesh networking technique that helps kids locate each other in cyberspace—a sort of social network/peer-to-peer with physical proximity. It's very cool but guaranteed to unnerve some parents in this country as they can locate others in cyberspace.

The built-in trackpad is confusing. At the center of the wrist rest are three white squares. Only the one in the middle is the real trackpad area. The unexpected? There's no CD or DVD drive—actually no "moving" media parts. Not even a hard drive. There's a sweet built-in camera, though.

The applications created for the XO didn't bowl me over, but they did humble me quite a bit because many of them, like the musical exploration app, require the mindset of a programmer. The browser (a Firefox variant), word processor, RSS reader, and document viewer let kids communicate. (It's high time there was a simple but elegant word processor for kids.) Multimedia tools such as paint programs are similar to those that many children are used to working with. All applications are open source code; a complete list of planned and implemented applications appears on the OLPC wiki.

Two of the big topics on the discussion groups are how much will the OLPC really cost and is it so very different from low-cost PCs. When Negroponte started OLPC, the cost of computing was considerably higher. Ars Technica takes a look how OLPC is grappling with other low-cost computer solutions.

The bottom line? This XO is a truly novel experience, some good, some less good. The OLPC is elegant, verbal, and high-minded in its vision. Just reading the web site gives you goosebumps about what the future could hold for connected kids. As is often the case, the implementation of that vision turns out to be both a bit more expensive and a bit less dramatic than the claims. If I were the Minister of Education in a poor country, I'd want to do a small pilot study before giving every child their own XO.