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 […]
xo laptop
OLPC XO 1.5 laptops don’t support mesh networking
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 […]
OLPC XO tablet features a Marvell CPU, boring design
The folks at One Laptop per Child appear to be taking a different approach toward their next-generation hardware. In fact, the next XO product won’t be a laptop at all. Instead it will be a tablet. And instead of designing the tablet in-house like it did the original XO Laptop, OLPC is working with chip […]
XO Laptops to use Pixel Qi low power displays
In an announcement that shouldn’t surprise anyone, the One Laptop Per Child folks have announced that they will be licensing Pixel Qi technology and outfitting future XO Laptops with 3qi displays. Pixel Qi was founded by Mary Lou Jepsen, who was one of the folks behind the design of the original XO Laptop. The Pixel […]
OLPC to give new XO laptops a more grownup keyboard?
The OLPC XO Laptop is arguably the first netbook. It’s small, light, durable, and cheap. But the XO has always been aimed at the education market, with a focus primarily on getting computers into the hands of young children in developing nations. And that probably explains why the computer has an unusual, silicone keyboard with […]
OLPC XO 1.5 hits the FCC
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 […]
OLPC XO-3 tablet concept in pictures
It’s probably not going to happen. Let’s be honest about that. As we’ve previously mentioned, Nicholas Negroponte’s newest vision for a next-generation educational computer isn’t a laptop, it’s a touchscreen tablet that will use less than 1W of power and cost $75. That already seemed pretty unrealistic, but now that I’ve seen the concept images […]
Sugar on a Stick v2 brings OLPC interface to any netbook
Sugar OS is the custom Linux user interface designed for the OLPC XO Laptop. Sugar on a Stick is a project that lets you run Sugar from a USB flash drive, no XO laptop required. I first checked out Sugar on a Stick earlier this year, when it was still a bit rough around the […]
OLPC scraps XO-2 dual screen laptop, moves toward ARM-based XO-1.75
Remember that dual-touchscreen concept machine that the One Laptop Per Child folks were working on? Yeah, it’s toast. In a recent interview, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told Xconomy that the team is killing off the XO-2 project and instead focusing on an XO Laptop version 1.75. For anyone keeping track, the first XO Laptop had […]
OLPC Afghanistan builds pedal power system for XO Laptop
While the OLPC XO Laptop is certainly a low power machine, that’s just not good enough if you’re in an environment where there’s sometimes no power to be had. If you can’t plug in your computer to charge it, what good is it? Well, plenty if you come up with a way to charge it […]