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It’s been years in coming. And it costs about 188% of its original projected price. But Nick Negroponte’s “$100 Laptop” has finally arrived. To be more specific, mine arrived in the mail toady. What follows is my initial impression of the “XO” and some pictures.

Construction:

This is one area where the XO excels. The diminutive lappy is rock solid. One can imagine a post apocalyptic world in which the OLPC is the only technological reminder of an earlier era. I must confess to skepticism when I first read that the XO had a rotating screen. It seemed that the Achilles heel of laptops of 10 times the cost, would be unlikely to be sturdily implemented in a laptop less expensive than many DVD players

As advertised, the keyboard appears water resistant. Of course this is probably made somewhat superfluous by the fact that the “ears”, which cover the ports, are not secure enough to keep water out of the ports. So, yeah, the keyboard survived that dunking in a river, unfortunately, the top half is full of water.

Ergonomics:

The XO fails miserably when it comes to ergonomics. I second the comment that many others have made that the keyboard is too small for even the tiniest of hands. In addition, the key action is much too shallow, although there is a slight springiness to the action that keeps your fingers from feeling like you are pounding on a plastic board.

Apart from the problems with the keyboard, the “top” of the laptop — the screen side — is much too heavy. It appears that the bulk of the electronics are in the screen half. While this is certainly a novel approach, I suspect that the reason that most other manufacturers place the electronics in the base is the same reason that the XO fails in this regard: the unit is dangerously top heavy. And yes, the XO is very sturdy, but I cannot praise a design that seems designed to make the accidents inevitable in a device used by kids more likely.

Interface:

My initial impression of “Sugar”, the XO’s operating system, was quite positive, when I was running it under VMWare on an Intel core quad. Unfortunately, on the 433MHz AMD Geode processor, Sugar bogs down with only a few programs — called “activities” — running. In addition, one “fundamental” application, web browsing, fails miserably. It can be argued that the primary purpose of a computer like the XO is for activities like word processing. In the modern, web centric world, however, I think that a solid web browser is key. The XO’s browser only supports one tab. In addition, even moderately sized web pages are unmanageable given the impossible, stuttery nature of scrolling. Finally, flash claims to be installed, but not a single flash app that I tried to load — YouTube, Simpleviewer and an MP3 player — loaded.

Apart from performance issues, I am not sold on the layout of sugar. Instead of a traditional menu based system (K or Windows), Sugar employs a weird dock based system somewhat reminiscent of OS X, except it doesn’t really work. The dock surrounds the entire window when it is visible, much like a picture frame. In the short time that I used the XO, however, the “dock” was invariably invisible whenever I wanted to use it for something, and it invariably appeared as soon as I tried to do something near the edge of the screen — unless it didn’t. I cannot quite figure out the logic behind it at the moment, however, sometimes it seems to appear or not on a logic all its own.

Final Word:

While the XO is an interesting device, I, for one, cannot really recommend it either as a system for those in the third world, or anywhere else. While it came in close to on target price wise, that is actually not my main criticism. I think that it is amazing that they OLPC foundation is able to design a laptop for $188(ish). The problem is that it is so underpowered and difficult to use that it seems rather a waste at any price. Particularly given that many of the areas it is destined for lack clean water and available power.

In addition, all other criticisms aside, I cannot help but wonder at the logic of introducing youngsters to an operating system unlike anything they are likely to ever use once they advance beyond the XO. There are a number of operating systems in use around the world today. None of them bear significant resemblance to Sugar. How are students raised on this proprietary system supposed to transition to “real” computers?

Finally, the model for continued software development and troubleshooting for the XO relies mostly upon the users (children) writing their own software and providing their own service. Not only do I doubt both the ethical and moral efficacity of such a system, I rather suspect that the mesh networking and peer created software will spawn massive bugs and viruses that spread across the network.

In short, while an interesting experiment, I do not think that the XO will prove a viable solution in the wild.