Monthly Archives: December 2007

XO UnBoxed

XO
I came home today find my XO laptop at the door. If you ordered one and it’s “on its way” here’s what to expect when you
get it. I’ve been trying to register it but that hasn’t worked yet..though i did register at the wiki site.

Come see what the XO Unboxed looks like HERE

XO XO XO

Hugs and Kisses, Everyone!
No no no no no no…this isn’t about hugs and kisses.. although what a nice sentiment.
I’m talking about the XO laptop. olpc

I’m waiting for this box to show up with a lovely little green laptop inside , which kind of replaces the 12″ G4 that I sold off last year, and though for my purposes- the iphone does what I needed a laptop for, i’m looking forward to a device as small and useful as the EMATE emate

The eMate was a Newton in “user friendly clothing”. Without an XO on hand to accurately talk about the experience, I can talk about the emate since I used one as a laptop from 1996-1999. It was quite a wonderful device. In an era of 10bt ethernet getting upgraded to 100bt- the emate had two pcmcia ports which allowed dialup and networked capabilities with a Farallon card. It also used IR (like a Newton) to print to particular IR laser printers. And the software set was awesome, a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar, addressbook and draw program. Tons of Newton Games (i liked startrek the best) and user friendlyness, Very good handwriting recognition (but it had a keyboard) and tons of battery life. It had a web browser and AppleSpeech – so it could announce
meetings! But -in retrospect- the coolest part was the development environment. I’m not a programmer but anyone who
opened up the Newton Dev kit and read through the process would get a great running start at object oriented development.
Persistent memory, Soups, and GUI all integrated to make a foundation for programming a Newton easy- and understandable from a non programmers perspective.
I know the XO will have various environments for programming. It’s not meant to be an “adult” laptop but i can see the adoption coming once these things (and especially Mesh Networking) become sociable. Social websites, like MySpace and FaceBook, LinkedIn and etc etc. could get a meaningful extension once collaboration via Mesh becomes commonplace (indeed the computer revolution is turning the corner on the MY COMPUTER generation- we’ll be using MY NETWORK instead-
the extensible computing ENVIRONMENT)
So even though the XO is primarily an education device- i think we’ll see it extend beyond that- not in commercial capacity (leave that to Intel) – but in a social capacity- a geek toy for kids- that will ultimately, not necessarily, be used
to extend the network of the world.