Over the last few days, reports and pictures have surfaced showcasing the new OLPC XO-3 tablet that will be debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The 8-inch tablet will cost under $100 for its target market. In terms of what’s under the hood, The Verge reports: In terms of raw specs, the XO 3.0 has an 8-inch, 1024 x 768-resolution PixelQi display, which can be read indoors and out, a Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, 512MB of RAM, and will be configurable with either Android or Sugar operating systems. Sugar...

And speaking of low-cost computers like the OLPC, Slashdot has a post about a company developing a micro-sized computer on a circuit board that will be three times faster than the Raspberry Pi (pictured at left),, and cost 40% less at $15 each (once it gets into mass production). As submitted by a representative of that company, the post reads: "An initiative by a Community Interest Company Rhombus Tech aims to provide Software (Libre) Developers with a PCMCIA-sized modular computer that could end up in mass-volume products. The reference design mass-volume pricing guide from the SoC...

Version 1.75 of the One Laptop Per Child laptop has passed testing at the FCC. There are no photos or advanced technical details on the FCC site (indeed, there’s a letter asking the FCC to keep all that information confidential for 180 days (PDF) to protect manufacturer Quanta’s trade secrets), but prior coverage from Engadget shows the netbook is very similar in appearance to prior OLPC models. (The planned OLPC tablet is apparently still some distance away.) The main difference from previous OLPCs seems to be that since OLPC has started using a low power Marvell Armada CPU, it...

This in-depth Wired feature article by Clive Thompson is a few months old, but I ran across it in an old print issue of Wired Magazine today at work and was completely fascinated. It does not have anything to do with e-books directly, perhaps, but is a great example of how new electronic media can be used for educational purposes. Salman Khan, a three-time MIT graduate with a Harvard MBA, was inspired while tutoring cousins in 2004 to begin creating educational YouTube videos along with self-testing software to help students learn from them. Before he knew it, thousands...

Geek.com reports on a talk given by Eben Upton (video embedded below), director of the Raspberry Pi foundation that is producing a $25 PC for use in education (but that also runs Quake 3 pretty well) that will be released later this year. Upton goes into detail on the rationale behind the PC, including some interesting information on the thought process that went into developing it. For example, the $25 price point came about because that’s about what textbooks cost, and Upton wanted buying it to be a comparable decision for parents to buying a kid’s textbook. ...

OLPC, Sugar on a Stick, eat your hearts out. Game developer David Braben has come up with a $25 ARM-based full-fledged computer in a USB stick form factor. The device has a USB port in one  end and an HDMI port in the other; if you plug a monitor into the HDMI and a keyboard or USB hub + keyboard and mouse into the USB, you have a full-fledged working computer that will run Linux, or it could be combined with a touchscreen to make a cheap tablet. It will probably ship with Ubuntu. Braben plans to use this...

Reuters is carrying a story on publisher Nicholas Callaway, who has been publishing beautiful coffee-table books since 1980, has recently decided that books that used to belong on the coffee table will work better as interactive apps on a tablet. Whereas it used to be that huge pages with detailed pictures were the way to go, now Callaway is more interested in smaller screens. "This is revolutionary," he says, stroking his finger at the iPad's glass surface and prodding to open an app he has developed. "This is the Looking Glass. This is Alice in Wonderland....

It’s long been a truism of the net that free information flow and freedom have a lot to do with each other. You see it in cases like the recent revolution in Egypt where the Egyptian government tried to stifle dissent by shutting off the Internet, and again in the current situation in Libya. E-books and other long-form digital reading matter are one point on that information spectrum, but so are forms as small as tweets or as large as digital video broadcasts. TechCrunch has an interesting post by guest author Shervin Pishevar, founder of the OpenMesh Project, in...

Remember that $35 Android tablet from India we reported on last year? The latest in a long line of Indian vaporware, praised by Nicholas Negroponte, it was supposed to receive educational subsidies and be made available to students—though reports surfaced that it was actually a Chinese Android tablet and not actually a home-grown device at all. Now India’s Economic Times has a report saying that the vendor who was to provide a guarantee bond to back the device’s production (in accordance with Indian legal requirements) has backed out of a $13 million commitment. According...

We’ve already talked about Marvell and OLPC getting cozy, what with OLPC basing its XO-3 model on a Marvell reference design. Now Robert Buderi reports on Xconomy that Marvell has ponied up a $5.6 million grant to OLPC to help it develop the XO-3 through 2011. “Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” [OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte] says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.” They were already one of ten overall corporate sponsors, Negroponte said, but now...

Indian Android news site Androidos.in has broken the news that the $35 “home-grown” tablet touted by the government of India (and lauded by OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte) looks suspiciously similar (that is to say, identical) to Chinese manufacturer HiVision’s Speedpad Android tablet. AndroidOS reports that HiVision’s tablet was first seen at CeBIT in March, 2010, where it was predicted to retail for about $100. Androidos is not pleased by the discovery that this tablet, claimed to be the result of development at India’s top engineering colleges, has apparently turned out to be a Chinese import in actuality: ...

Just a couple days ago I wrote about an article wondering if the iPad had “preemptively killed the US tablet market”. It would seem at least one person believes the answer is no, because CNet is running a brief piece by Brooke Crothers predicting that a lot of media pads are on the way, and listing some of the features they might have. What I take from all this is that prognostication is really anybody’s guess. And speaking of prognostication, fresh from offering his $100 tablet expertise to the makers of India’s announced $35 tablet, Nicholas Negroponte...