My XO laptop and the XOXO laptop

I finally received my laptop from the One Laptop per Child foundation as I had participated in their X-Mas Give-One-Get-One program, as I told you about back in December. It showed up pretty late but I guess that is a good thing as I hope it means they’ve been busy producing many of these in order to fulfill their education goals. It’s been a long time coming and I’m not talking about me getting mine – the complete time line will give you a better idea of what I mean.

Starting with the packaging in which I received the laptop, everything feels well thought-out. This is the view of the laptop as it lies closed, it is really small and you immediately get the feel that it actually is designed with a child in mind. For reference, here’s an open view next to my mouse and with my finger, for scale.

Once running, the laptop picks-up all the available network connections in the neighborhood and starts wanting to create mesh networks with other XO laptop, which were not present in my neighborhood. I would have been curious to see how well that would have worked and how easy it would have been to establish connections with other users. Something many children in developing countries hopefully will be experiencing rather than I.

Other than the typical laptop use, it is interesting to note how easily the XO transforms into a tablet PC for games/reading. This feature is key in making this the center piece of the education ambitions of the foundation and this is validated once you see the direction of the XOXO laptop, the second generation XO already in the design stage.

Here’s a sneak peak of the Yves Béhar re-design and you can easily tell how contemporary this version looks with its touch screen keyboard compared to the first version – not that kids in developing countries will care, all they will want is to get their hands on a laptop and the access to the rest-of-the-World it will give them.