One Laptop Per Child: sale begins today

[cos]

"... a new laptop that's spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It's fanless, it's silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration. And this laptop will cost $200."
-- New York Times, 2007-10-04

One Laptop Per Child started out with the goal of designing a computer that would cost $100, and be usable by kids in third world countries with no computer literacy (or even literacy) to begin with, and no infrastructure (safe storage, power plugs, ...). They ended up with one that costs $200, and now it's ready to see if they meet the other goals. Along the way, they designed something wacky, weird, and new: it has no disk (it uses 512MB flash storage), a completely new user interface, can be charged by solar power or hand crank, and has an unusual security model, among other things.

"Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time in North America. For $399, you will be purchasing two laptops XOone that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home."
-- laptopgiving.org

These XO Laptops are intended for participating governments of third world countries, to distribute to children, and they say this fundraiser is the only time they'll be selling them here in North America.

XO Laptops can auto-sense each other's proximity, and make it easy for you to quickly start interacting with the other laptops ("let's draw together!"). Which means they're more fun when there are more of them around. I'm gonna get one. Who else?

Comments

[lightvortex.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I thought that they had 1gb of flash (I'm looking back at a post (http://lightvortex.livejournal.com/89161.html) where I asserted that they did, after being at a presentation given by some of their developers).

I'm considering buying one because I want to look at accessibility at some point when I have time (which isn't right now; need to finish hacking on Abiword first...)

I hope someone develops something like it but intended for use by adults (preferably with a larger keyboard). Having a laptop that can be hand-charged would be really neat. I can picture it being useful if I'm on a long train or bus trip or otherwise don't have access to power but want to be able to get work done, and, the less coal we're burning, the better...