I just received my OLPC from the “Give One Get One” program. For the uninitiated, this is the program that aims to send $100 ($200) laptops to children in undeveloped nations.
First thoughts are that this is a cool little laptop. It is very light. The screen is small but has decent resolution, in the 800×600 range. The processor is an AMD Geode 400 mHZ, it’s got a gig of flash for storage, and 256 megs of RAM. It seems a tad sluggish for a machine with those specs (similar specs to my firewall at home which runs X fine), but not so slow that you couldn’t get used to it.
The UI is neat, running on top of Linux and I understand mostly written in python. There’s a video recording app (did I mention the thing has a camera?), word processor, browser. There’s a little python IDE with some sample programs (basic math, print Pascal’s triangle and Fibonacci numbers, etc). And a terminal where you discover that the device has vim installed but no gcc. C programmers everywhere cry.
All in all, it’s probably not going to work for anyone who already has a laptop, or any adult for that matter without using a USB keyboard since the keys are so small (mine is eventually going to my nephews). But I think if I got this at age 6, it would spark my imagination as much or more than the C=64. I think we’ll see a lot of computer professionals emerging from these countries in 20 years.
(A few more pics at flickr.)
