OLPC announces "Give 1 Get 1" XO
The OLPC XO-1 is built to a maximum cost of $188, with the aim being to reduce the cost to $100 by 2008.
The initiative has been going on for a while now, desperately trying to design and build cheap laptops for children in developing countries. This effort culminated in the XO-1 system, which costs just $188.
The XO-1 is built by Quanta Computers and houses a wireless LAN, 1GB of flash memory and 256 MB of DRAM, as well as a camera, microphone and Fedora-based OS. With an incredibly low price, the laptop is obviously of immediate interest to tinkerers and geeks everywhere who have, until now, been unable to get their geeky mitts on one.
According to OLPC news however, the laptop will soon be available to the general public - albeit on one condition.
As part of a "Give 1 Get 1" holiday promotion, the laptops will go on sale in the US on November 12th at double the usual price. Before you start calling the company greedy sell-outs though, know that the machine will cost double for a reason. For every XO-1 bought by the general public, another one will be built for a developing country.
The promotion will apparently only last for two weeks though, with XO-1s arriving in time to be wrapped and put under the Christmas tree, so you better get your skates on if you want to let foreigners experience the joy of SimCity.
Will you be ordering one, or donating to the company in the future? If you could have designed a $100 laptop, what would you have put in it? Let us know in the forums!
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17 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replythey aren't that bad for work computers..... just insert a larger hard drive and you are good to go..... and a black coat of paint.
that laptop is great for some small office action or lecture note viewing. but it's a shame that it won't be able to play World In Conflict :D
$400 is actually pretty good if durability and battery life is one of your requirements. i can see ecologists toting these things into the forest or whatnot to take notes.
love charity :)
your clearly missing the point here
Does your asus EEE give half of its cost to charity. Im thinking NO!!!
The point is your getting what is a very good laptop for the money, as mentioned above is tough, durable, light, rechargable with or without a power source and its perfect for general task.
Plus the added kick of half of what you pay goes to making another one that goes to someone in the world that needs it more then you do. Is like giving presents to your local charity to give to kids etc... except this time you get one and some kid gets one :D
Before purchasing you need to weigh in your mind why there have been no reviews about these systems that actually had benchmarks attributed to them in order to demonstrate their abilities. You would not want to purchase an expensive toy or help to contribute to a not ready for prime time product?
The saddest part of the entire concept is Mr Negroponte recount of the experiences he had for coming up with the idea in the first place. He said he assisted in bringing laptops to an impoverished village, some of the people used their laptops as a light source for the entire family. Would it not be better money spent if you are in a giving mood to donate your charity to building generation or at least purchasing generators for these villages so the children could have light to read a common book before introducing laptops to them. this whole thing smells of what Paul Theroux wrote in his excellent book Mosquito Coast where the character brought Ice to an area when Ice was the least of their problems.
If not it should be hackable. The specs look just about high enough to get flash running, and it's open source so you can always use package manager to grab Mozilla, right?