OLPC/XO – Dr Tech’s Review Pt 1

Well it arrived, and it works. But is all the hype or the degradation of this laptop worth the amount of posts and print that have been published? Is there not a grey area in the middle as often it has seemed the XO laptop has polarised views either against or for the programme that it is only one part of.

My immediate and probably everyone’s first reaction is ‘blimey it is small’ but considering I tend to opt for laptops of the 17″ screen size variety is probably not a very good comparison. As many other reviewers have pointed out the feel of the XO laptop is pleasing almost rough and dimply compared to the slickness and metallic of so many laptops around. BUT can you get into it without being told….hmm…only one out of five people managed it. Weirdly it makes sense however straight after the first time you do open up the laptop see the screen, and realise the consummate skill that has led to a design which is robust and will obviously stand up to the dusty surrounds it was meant for. Trust me after living in Cairo for three years, changing laptop fans and cleaning keyboards was a nightmare.

Once booted, you are met with the Sugar interface and cover for the Linux OS under the hood. I have been lucky enough to try the emulator for this and can say that it again does take a bit of getting used too, but the premise almost Expose like is a good one whereby moving your mouse to the edge of the screen will bring up icons that move onto or off of the screen. The buttons to link to the different main areas of neighbourhood and so on, are an excellent and quick way to navigate around the environment. This laptop is though very difficult to review, as you can come up with many niggles, including that the mouse movement with pad can be very niggly and lead to a sometimes tetchy navigation experience..however remember it will eventually only be 100$.

I love the way that you connect to nodes, the internet through a visual interface and it it is that easy as to choose a wi-fi point (or other node of the mesh, although no other XO’s around Egham I think :(~) Connecting to my wireless connection at home was a breeze but at school a major problem was trying to connect through to the proxy server. And yes with firefox if you do goto about:config you should be able to change the proxy but for some reason I am unable to modify this setting whatever I try. Any help would be much appreciated.

I was very much taken with photographs of the way the XO can be turned into a simple ebook reader, and the manipulation and design of both the screen into position and the way you can with one button click and change the direction the screen is being read is ingenious. As is when you pop in your USB with said PDF, go to the activities page and then with a click are able to read the PDF. BUT is that all that I have done, well I have to admit time has not allowed me to play with any of the inbuilt tools and I will leave that to a helpful student this Friday to review those for me. Although I could not help but install DOOM and have a go...and yes it works if a little slowly.

So initial impressions are very good, as long as you fully understand the principles that this is not a laptop built for the western market to play with, not even for geeks like myself, but as a tool for third world children to use and enjoy for many hours. With a few updates and improvements it should enable these children to have their first adventures into the world of communication and computing and who knows where that can lead them.

Part Two Coming Soon – hopefully with a review from a younger student…