The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing better education to developing countries around the world. It’s doing so through its XO laptop, and software and solutions surrounding the XO laptop. While it may not be a performance machine, it’s still a technological inspiration as it balances on the thin line of cost and durability. The purpose was to build an extremely cheap computer it could sell, without profit, to improve education in third-world countries.
The XO laptop went live in November, 2007, and has been shipped in numbers beyond 600,000 to countries including Peru, Uruguay, Mongolia, Haiti, Rwanda, Mexico, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the USA and Canada (as a result from the Give One Get One campaign). The initial goal was to build a laptop that would only cost $100, but OLPC was unable to reach this goal as XO costs $188 today. The goal of XO-2 is $75, we can only wait and see if they will succeed.
“One Laptop per Child and the XO laptop are crucial to the fulfillment of the proposed UN Ninth Millennium Goal: to ensure that every child between the ages of 6 and 12 has immediate access to a personal laptop computer by 2015,” said Nirj Deva, Member of the European Parliament. “It’s only through access to education that young people will be able to develop the skills necessary to compete globally and to develop the solutions required to break the cycles of poverty, disease and malnutrition. Learning unites the child with the world, binds the village into a community, and joins that community to the global village.”
OLPC aims to lower the already low power consumption from 4W to below 1W with XO-2. Electricity isn’t a given in developing countries and a lower power consumption will also enable longer study sessions. At the same time, XO-2 will be half the size of XO and as a result, lighter than XO. It will have the same green color theme, but you can personalize the OLPC logo in different colors.
“It’s crucial that the design of the XO laptop produce something that is both highly functional and a lot of fun for children to use,” said Yves Behar, founder of the fuseproject, a San-Francisco-based design and branding firm, and the industrial designer of the XO laptop. “Children have an amazing capacity to let us know how they use the laptop and what they want. The design of the next-generation XO is in response to their passion for learning, for sharing with each other, and for self-expression.”
Among the enhanced features we see dual touch displays similar in design to those of XO. Vertically you will get a right and left page, horizontally you get a hinged laptop and in tablet mode you get a continuous display. The dual-touch display was developed by a former chief technology officer of OLPC and was specifically designed for the XO-2.
Multiple keyboard layouts makes it possible for the small children to use a simpler layout, while the older children can use the more advanced or specialized layouts.
Before XO-2 arrives in 2010, OLPC will introduce the transition model XO-1.5 which uses the same design as the first generation, but has less physical parts and lower cost than XO.
