[/caption] One of the defining characteristics of the OLPC XO Laptop is the little computer’s distinctive green plastic design, which extends to the keyboard which has a membrane-style keyboard that’s resistant to spills and dust. But if you’ve ever actually tried using an XO Laptop, you may find the keyboard take s a little getting used to. More importantly, the…

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The original OLPC XO Laptop sparked the netbook revolution by showing that laptops could be tiny, cheap, and still pretty useful. But the laptop also broke the mold in a few other ways, by using a spill and dust resistant membrane keyboard, a durable plastic frame, and an innovative user interface called Sugar OS. While Sugar was designed to make…

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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s XO Laptop was designed to be cheap, durable, and usable in places without consistent access to electricity or the internet. And so one of the features that distinguished the first generation XO Laptop was the inclusion of “mesh networking,” which let computers create local networks by searching for other XO Laptops nearby and forming…

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The One Laptop Per Child group is starting to send out test models of the new XO-1.5 laptop to members of their Contributors Program. The XO-1.5 is an updated version of the original XO laptop. The main difference is that the new model replaces the AMD Geode CPU with a faster VIA C7-M processor. Unfortunately, it’s still pretty tough for…

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The XO 1.5 laptop from OLPC is basically an incremental update to the original XO Laptop. The new model replaces the AMD Geode processor with a faster VIA C7-M CPU, but that’s the most significant change. This week the XO 1.5 hit the FCC, confirming that the laptop supports 802.11b/g WiFi. It also has 1GB of RAM and 4GB of…

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Interested in getting your hands on a pre-release OLPC XO 1.5 laptop? These are the next-generation XO Laptops that use a 1GHz VIA C7-M processors instead of hte slower 433MHz AMD Geode CPU found in the original XO Laptop. And the OLPC folks in Cambridge, Massachusets have about 30 of the new models lying around, which they’re willing to send…

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The OLPC XO Laptop 1.5 doesn’t just have a faster new processor. It has an entirely new motherboard. And OLPC volunteer Bernie Innocenti gives us a guided tour of the new mainboard in a video which you can find after the break. The new board is exactly the same size as the motherboard found in the original XO Laptop, which…

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The new OLPC XO 1.5 laptop might not look very different from the first generation XO laptop. But it has a faster VIA processor, and at least one neat software trick: Users can switch between the Sugar OS and a GNOME desktop environment in just about 15 seconds. Here’s what that means. Sugar was a custom user interface designed to…

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It’s been a few months since I’ve heard anything about the OLPC Xo laptop 1.5 refresh. but it looks like the new model is close enough to reality to have a working prototype floating around. The folks at the OLPC Learning Club in DC got a little hands-on time with an XO 1.5 prototype last night. The new model replaces…

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The folks at the OLPC Foundation have announced a major change in the XO Laptop hardware. The XO 1.5 will look almost identical to the original XO Laptop. But instead of using an AMD Geode low power processor, it will sport a VIA C7-M CPU. Last month there was a rumor going around that OLPC was going to drop the…

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