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.

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

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.