OLPC XO User Review Discussion

The OLPC XO is the new children's laptop designed to make computers accessible to children all over the world. How does it perform? How does it compare to the popular Asus Eee PC? Is the OLPC XO destined for greatness ... or will you regret the purchase? Let's take a look.

Read the full content of this Article: OLPC XO User Review

 

Very nice review. The comparison to the Eee is much appreciated!

Think the OLPC-XO will come in various colurs?

 

Could you have been more specific in your battery life test? How long had you kept playing videos and testing music off and on?

 

Agreed, a test of how long it takes to drain while just browsing or typing would be great
preferably two one with the backlight the other with the backlight off

 

I'd like to see a deeper investigation into the dual-mode display. While the display is 1200x900 in monochrome mode, colour mode uses a unique pixel geometry with the colours aligned on diagonals that causes the effective resolution to be lowered significantly - a blur filter is also applied to the image to reduce colour artifacts from this.

Can we get some higher-resolution or macro shots of this?

 

This is just a user-submitted review ... and a pretty good one at that.

The editorial staff is expecting two XO laptops in the not-too-distant future, so we'll have a full review as soon as possible with detailed battery life information and more information on the "mesh networking."

 

I hope OLPC goes PRO.. (means without the kiddy teletubby look..)

 

What happened to the crank/string that charges the laptop in the middle of nowhere?

 

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing...I knew they got rid of the crank because the laptop wasn't durable enough....

 

I ordered mine the first day it was available. I hope I get to play with it before Christmas.

 

Looks like a toy when put beside e3...

 

It's a wonderful review Kinda sad that it looks like a Mattel toy =P

 

For those wondering, the hand crank and on board generator were dropped for reliability problems and to save cost. For countries that are purchasing these there was supposed to be a hand-crank generator available that would allow you to charge several laptops at a time.

 

well it seems, that apart from design, lcd and battery, asus eee is a winner...
yes, it does not have such durability, but at least can handle youtube or simple programming environment (other than turtle graphics).

from my point of view any person older than 11-12 years can take care of his/her things, so for that audience asus eee is more suitable. that leaves us with 6-11 years children, hm, still that is a big crowd

 

Not to mention, as a pro, the attempt is to save the world

 

Save the world with a Green Teletubby!

 

It sounds like the OLPC laptop does everything as Negroponte has promised (save for the built-in crank, though that was dropped some time ago). While I would question how useful these necessarily are for a NA audience, I really think that, when they're placed in a technology-poor environment, that they hold exceptional promise. The mesh-networking, use of open standards in most cases (save, amusingly enough, for in the case of the mesh-networking technology), and ability to learn about the guts of the OS and change it strikes me as significant improvements over the e3, when considering the environment that the OLPC is intended to be massively deployed in.