XO: approved for usage on one's lap

Did you know most "laptops" are now called "notebook PCs" these days because they aren't actually approved for usage on one's lap? They are such energy hogs full of bloatware that they run much too hot most of the time to comfortably and safely use them on your lap.

Today I ordered my OLPC XO laptop. The famed $100 laptop! Okay, so it's actually costing me $423.95 through the GOGO program, at least I was "allowed" to purchase one at all.

One of it's MANY, MANY neato features is the part where it is the first laptop to be certified as an actual laptop in several years. In other words, it is approved for use while it is actually on your lap. It has other great features, but you should watch these YouTube videos to learn more for yourself. It'll be sooo much easier than me trying to type it all out and probably more interesting as well.







The one feature I believe MY XO laptop will be missing is a manual power supply. Well, those things don't come standard even if you are a child in a developing nation, but it may be easier for them to obtain one. I'm pretty sad about this because I'm really excited about that feature. I wish every laptop and appliance had options like that. Well, maybe they kind of do...in trying to find something that would let ME power my XO, I checked out the laptop.org wiki and found, as perhaps my most promising and available option, the "Weza", a foot crank power source that costs $269.99...that's more than the laptop costs! Still, I hope I can afford one because it looks totally cool and like it would power other stuff as well although...the XO requires something like 1/10 the power of your standard laptop, so where I think you can power the XO Laptop for ten minutes with one minute of hand powered effort, I guess you would have to keep cranking or pumping or foot stomping or whatever for the entire time you were using a more energy-hogging Notebook PC.

So, if they're going to make this laptop available at all to the "general public" in the U.S. and Canada, wouldn't it be nice to make the hand powered option available for purchase as well? I'd like to be able to power stuff by hand without paying $270. I really want the XO "yoyo". Here you can see the Yoyo in action, although you may not want to watch this entire video as it is a little boring...


After ordering my XO this morning, I spent the entire rest of the morning reading anything I could find about the promotion and the XO and stuff. First I read a bunch of news stories that all said almost exactly the same thing, then I started watching stuff on YouTube, which is where I found the videos above, and finally I ended up at the laptop.org wiki, which is mostly for developers but contained some interesting nuggets. I haven't found a community of non-engineering information about the XO yet, but then I was reading and watching more than I was searching.

I did see a video where some students in Brazil were trying the laptops. Their teacher didn't seem to like them very much, and felt it was the teachers that should get computers, not the students, but I got the impression that may have been more because the teachers seem to have been somewhat forgotten in this initiative. So, it's not that she felt her students shouldn't have laptops, it's just...why do they get laptops and all this support and SHE DOESN'T? I know I'd probably be a bit sore if I were an overworked, underpaid teacher and all my kids got laptops and I was supposed to just help them use them and make projects that used them when I didn't even get a laptop myself, all so these children could grow up to save the world while meanwhile remembering me as that teacher that didn't even really know how to use an XO. Or something like that. It just seems like maybe the OLPC initiative spent more time simply designing the laptop and not so much thinking about social dynamics or classroom dynamics.

So, I hope that even though I didn't get up and order my laptop at 3am when ordering first opened that I get mine in the first shipment. It sounds like 40,000 of them are supposed to be manufactured by the end of the month, and half of those will go to the GOGO participants in the U.S. and Canada, and the other half to a number of different developing nations. Then, in December twice as many will be produced, but people that don't get laptops from that first lot really aren't going to have them until early next year.

I am going to be anxiously awaiting mine! Too bad it's not like ordering something on the Apple website where you can track your package as it leaves the factory in China and makes it's way around the world to your home.