The One Laptop Per Child foundation set out with an ambitious goal about half a decade ago, to deliver a $100 laptop that could change the face of education in the developing world. That never quite happened, but the team has delivered a number of durable, inexpensive computers to classrooms around the globe and changed the way we think about cheap laptops.
OLPC’s XO Laptop project also probably sparked for-profit companies like Asus to introduce the first netbooks, which eventually drove down the average selling price of notebooks in general and paved the way for tablets.
Now the OLPC team is ready to launch something a bit different… a cheap Android tablet with a custom user interface designed for education. Unlike most OLPC products which aren’t sold at retail in the US, you should be able to pick up an XO-Tablet from Walmart starting July 16th. Maybe.
OLPC has been showing off prototypes of the new tablet since January, and the last I’d heard, it was actually supposed to hit Walmart in June. So I’d take that July 16th date with a grain of salt.
But that’s the date OLPC says the tablet is due. Interestingly, the news came in a blog post refuting a recent article from OLPC News claiming that things are falling apart at the OLPC Foundation. There have been a number of key employees departing recently, but according to the team that remains, that’s due to a shift in focus, not the demise of the project.
Of course, the fact that it took a week and a half to formulate a response and post it online doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Then again, neither did the hardware the company was showing off earlier this year.
Update: OLPC did sort of respond to the original article a day after it was published, but didn’t mention the article by name.
Hopefully the team has worked out some of the kinks that made the demo unit I played with feel so sluggish.
The OLPC foundation isn’t putting all their eggs in one basket. In addition to the XO-Tablet, the team is also working on an XO-4, which is a convertible notebook which looks a lot like the company’s earlier laptops with a rugged case and sunlight viewable display. It transforms into a tablet when you rotate the screen and fold it down over the keyboard.
That project’s also running behind schedule. The XO-4 was originally scheduled to launch by March.
OLPC seems a bit irrelevant today. It actually kind of did what it set out to do, just not the way it envisioned. Basic computing devices are cheap and getting cheaper. I am not sure a custom user interface is really needed or desirable though.
“It actually kind of did what it set out to do”
Why do you think “they” did what they set out to do?
“Basic computing devices are cheap and getting cheaper.”
Don’t you think that would have happened regardless of OLPC’s existence?
Hey Brad,
thanks a lot for this article and the links back to my OLPC News pieces.
And while I like to criticize OLPC as much as the next guy (well, maybe a little more) I just wanted to point out that the organization did in fact originally respond to my “Things Fall Apart” piece a day after I published it: http://blog.laptop.org/2013/06/28/olpc-welcomes-new-members The post provides much less context – and specifically does not mention my piece – but content-wise it addresses most of the concerns I had raised.
Cheers and keep up the excellent work,
Christoph
Thanks. I missed that — probably because it wasn’t a very straightforward response. But it does have a lot of the usual language about staying strongly committed that you’d expect to see.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Though at least that original post didn’t end with a paragraph that sounds like someone is having a bad trip in a reality distortion field. 😉
so you give a laptop to a kid who cant read or write in 7 th grade thanks to our miserable union run Guvment scoos and this will make them brilliant,,,oh that’s brilliant..
Written by someone who looks to be in the 7th grade…
Disclaimer, I don’t follow the OLPC movement but when it comes down to dollars and cents if this thing comes to be it is going head to head with the $99 Sero 7 Lite at Walmart. It might not be as durable in terms of the casing but the Sero 7 lite would most likely run circles around the OLPC tablet.