NOTE: One guy at TC40 had a OLPC laptop and it would squeal like a dying rat every few minutes. Not a good sign. – JB
This One Laptop Per Child business has been making waves since the days when I read Slashdot for fun, but Laptop Magazine just gave it a whirl. We already know that real life kids gave it the thumbs up a few weeks back, and now we have Laptop’s seal of approval. (“In its own way, the XO is more of a catalyst for technological change than Apple’s iPhone” isn’t a sentence to blow past with reckless abandon.) While noting the difficulties adults will likely have with the laptop—it is for kids after all—Laptop seems to have been most impressed. It runs on a Red Hat derivative, which automatically gives it geek cred, and is durable enough to withstand all the tough environments where you might expect the laptop to be launched.
This hands-on lead to an important question: why aren’t “real” laptops as good, price:performance-wise, as the One Laptop?
After seeing the One Laptop in action, Laptop put together a wish list of what it wants computer manufacturers to incorporate into their next line of laptops. To sum up: the laptop is as green as it gets, the OS puts Vista to shame, the keyboard is liquid-proof (read: coffee-proof) and the screen is bright enough to be read in direct sunlight. (Try that with your current machine, see how it works.) The Laptop’s ad-hoc networking would also be a welcome addition to the average laptop.
Hands-On with One Laptop Per Child’s XO Laptop [Laptop Magazine]