A first look at the OLPC XO Laptop

One Laptop Per Child's XO Laptop is an extremely rugged, energy efficient, low cost laptop designed to be used by children in developing countries. The only way most people in the US or Canada can get one is through the Give One Get One program, which ends on December 31. I got mine yesterday.

Late in the afternoon UPS delivered a surprisingly small and heavy box containing the laptop. There was no inner box and only a sheet telling me to go to http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/start for setup instructions.

The laptop itself looks like a kid's toy laptop, with a tough membrane keyboard that's too small for adult hands. It would make a good first laptop for a kid in any country.

The OLPC laptop runs a Linux OS with a new graphical user interface called Sugar. It doesn't have a hard drive, only 1GB of flash memory. A USB port and SD card slot are available for storage expansion.

The user interface has no windows. Only a single task is visible at a time. The home screen shows the active tasks in a circle surrounding the user icon, with other tasks shown at the bottom of the screen. The neighborhood screen lets you connect to a wireless network and shows other XO users present. Unfortunately the current OS version doesn't support networks with WPA encryption, although that feature is supposed to be added in early 2008.

The built-in software includes several games and educational applications, a web browser, a painting program, audio & video recording, a few music applications, and a few introductory programming environments, including one that teaches Python.

All of the XO software is written in Python and in most applications you can hit Fn+Space to view the source code.

The screen can also be folded back, for use as an e-book reader.

The XO is a great laptop for elementary school kids and might be good as an internet appliance or e-book reader, but it has very little to offer most professionals.