By now I’m sure you have all heard of the One Laptop Per Child charity.  OLPC has received a lot of press coverage lately concerning mainly negatives toward their goals and product, the XO laptop.  I wanted to take an opportunity to research the product and see just what $200 was buying.  Overall I was impressed by what they have come up with.The XO has a simple design.  It has no moving parts including a hard drive, CD or DVD drive instead using a 1GB flash memory that can be augmented with a SD or USB (3 ports available) device.  Files can be backed up and access from a central storage system meant to be maintained by an educational facility or provided by a service such as Google.

A 433Mhz AMD chip provides the processing functionality.  The low power requirements of this chip allow the XO to operate without a cooling fan.  The processor goes into sleep mode during periods of inactivity to reduce power requirements.  Two options of batteries are provided each with costs of ~$10 to replace.  These batteries hold are able to charge the XO for 4 to 5 times longer than a normal laptop battery.  If normal wall socket charging is not available there are several options including a solar panel, a hand crank (similar to those used on wind-up radios), a foot pedal and a pull-string recharger, similar to a starter cord on a lawnmower. The pull-string charger provides 10 minutes of power per pull.

The system runs on Linux which takes only 130Mb of space.  It includes standard programs such as a web browser based on Firefox; a word processor able to handle most common document types, including Microsoft formats; a PDF reader and media player. In addition, it comes with games, a music creation tool and drawing programs.

While not providing an Ethernet port the XO does maintain robust WiFi functionality.  The XO operates on a wireless mesh network, each machine acting as a computer and router.  It is compatable with most wireless protocols but can network with other XO’s if no internet is available.  Machines in range of an internet connection share that connection with all other machines in the mesh.  The rabbit ears, dual onboard wi-fi antennas, boost the normal range 2 to 3 times.  Tests in the outback of Australia showed that two laptops could communicate more than 2km (1.2 miles) apart in ideal conditions.

The XO also provides an onboard camera for still and motion capture, a QWERTY based keyboard that supports a variety of languages, and a hard case with 400 color combinations so that children can more easily identify their machine.  The XO has been dropped at 5 feet and the keyboard dunked in water for 10 minutes with no breakage or reduction in functionality.