The XO Tablet is an Android tablet from the folks behind the One Laptop per Child program. It’s designed for kids, has a semi-rugged removable case, and a custom suite of software with a focus on educational apps and games.

You can also run normal Android apps on the $149 tablet, but there are parental controls which let you restrict the apps your kids are using.

When the XO Tablet launched in the US in July it was available exclusively at Walmart. Now you can order one from Amazon or Target as well. In fact, it’s out of stock at Walmart at the moment.

XO Tablet

There was a time when the OLPC Foundation was out ahead of the pack in trying to provide low-cost computers to kids in developing nations. The XO Laptop line feature rugged cases, low-power processors, long battery life, and displays that are meant to be easy to read even in direct sunlight.

The XO Tablet, on the other hand, is basically a cheap Android tablet built by Vivitar with the XO name and some custom software slapped on. It doesn’t seem to bring much to the tablet that you couldn’t get with another kid-friendly tablet like one of Fuhu’s Nabi tablets.

OLPC’s tablet features a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, a 1.6 GHz Marvell processor, Android 4.1 software, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and up to 7.5 hours of battery life.

via OLPC News

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6 replies on “OLPC’s $149 XO Tablet now available at more stores”

  1. OLPC is still out ahead of the pack in trying to provide low-cost computers to kids in developing nations. No other company has supplied all the students in even one country, and OLPC is on its third. (Peru and Uruguay fully, and Rwanda making steady progress, with XO deployments limited only by the rollout of electrical connections to schools.) The competition has done parts of Brazil, Venezuela, and Spain, one each, and tiny pilot projects elsewhere. India, Bangladesh, and South Korea have announced plans to roll out computers of their own (Aakash, Doel, and unnamed, respectively), but have not yet done so.

    The new XO tablet is a response to the naysayers who complained that OLPC at first sold only to governments, and not to the public. We at OLPC and Sugar Labs are porting our Sugar education software to it in a form that will not be readily available on other Android tablets unless somebody else (possibly other vendors, possibly independent groups) goes to the trouble of porting it to the various other versions of Android, and the various hardware of other tablets, in the same way that OLPC and Sugar Labs developed Sugar for Fedora Linux, and others ported it to Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions with varying completeness and success.

    I spent many years in global high-tech market analysis, and would be happy to write you an article on what is really going on in educational computing for eliminating poverty, which cannot be understood on the basis of First World Problems.

    1. OLPC is undoubtedly a major player in providing low-cost computers to children in developing nations, but your facts aren’t quite right. Peru has a school population of 6.5 million children. Less than one million XOs were purchased by the previous government, and the current government stopped the program. The percentage of students in Rwanda who have received XOs is smaller than in Peru. OLPC can certainly take credit for being the first company to supply computers to all the school children in one country: Uruguay.

  2. Most kids at the age this tablet directed at probably wouldn’t care but I’m interested as to whether or not it uses a pixel qi screen in the hopes that it would be a sign of a much more massive roll out of that display technology.

    1. Pixel Qi identified more than 200 markets for its technology before production for anything other than XOs began. (Personal communication from inside the company. The approximate number is not a corporate secret, but the list is, and I don’t have it.) Here is a link to a description of 15 products using their screens other than XOs. https://pixelqi.com/devices

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