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 is OLPC’s own Linux operating system, which was designed specifically for kids. "We designed the XO-3 with an open firmware and with open BIOs so it is easy to support multiple operating systems. Countries can choose between Android and Sugar," [OLPC CEO Ed] McNierney said.

The specs seem comparable to the Kindle Fire, which has a 1024×600 7” screen and also boasts 512 MB of RAM. And if OLPC cranks up its “Get One, Give One” program, the price to consumers would be about the same as the Kindle Fire, too.

In terms of design, the tablet is significantly thicker than the clipboard-like concept photos, and doesn’t have the concept’s finger-ring on the corner either. (Not surprising; it looked to me like it was just waiting to break off and leave sharp edges under any kind of physical abuse.) It has a silicone cover that should keep it safe in most conditions.

Here’s hoping the device does get offered to the public. It might make a nice alternative to the Fire for tablet-interested folks on a budget.

"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 manufacturer, for a device with similar capability to the Raspberry Pi, is around $15: 40% less than the $25 Raspberry Pi but for a device with an ARM Cortex A8 CPU 3x times faster than the 700mhz ARM11 used in the Raspberry Pi. GPL Kernel source code is available. A page for community ideas for motherboard designs has also been created. The overall goal is to bring more mass-volume products to market which Software (Libre) Developers have actually been involved in, reversing the trend of endemic GPL violations surrounding ARM-based mass-produced hardware. The Preorder pledge registration is now open (account creation required)."

The representative has been active in the discussion thread that followed, replying to users’ questions and comments. He notes that PCMCIA is just the form factor they’re using because it has a standardized form of connection that is still being manufactured; the devices will not fit into laptops’ PCMCIA card slots.

It’s pretty clear that if these boards become available, they could be used in a variety of electronic devices—computers, e-readers, circuit boards. And since their design is open, they could be easily adapted to make the devices less expensive, since the manufacturers don’t need to spend a fortune on their own circuit board research and development.

What isn’t clear to me, though, is what this means to me as an end-user at the moment. The FAQ doesn’t say what, if any, devices will actually be using Rhombus Tech’s card, or what non-technical end-users could do with it if given one.

(Indeed, the FAQ is sometimes so full of corporate-speak that it’s hard to make sense of it at all. “[The project’s goal is to] create a synergy between the ultra-low-cost Factories and SoC vendors of China with their expertise in Hardware, and Software (Libre) Developers with their expertise in GNU/Linux and other OSes, with a view to leveraging the combination to create affordable and desirable mass-volume products that are GPL-compliant before they hit the Retail Hypermarket shelves.” Synergy? Leveraging? Hypermarket? What?)

Raspberry Pi, at least, is actually going to ship full-fledged $25 computers that only lack being plugged into devices to use for standard Linux applications. But then, Raspberry Pi is further along in its development, so perhaps something similar will come of this project, too.

The main difference from previous OLPCs seems to be that since OLPC has started using a low power Marvell Armada CPU, it has been able to cut the power consumption of the 1.75 to only 2 watts so it is now feasible to power the machines with a hand crank (to some extent; it would take two hours of cranking to charge the laptop completely).

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 of people were watching his videos, and emailing to tell him how helpful they had been.

“You made me realize that anyone can learn the material when it is presented in the right way,” wrote Tom Brannan, a 19-year-old about to enter a Pennsylvania college. After dropping to a C in math, Brannan learned enough from Khan to ace his last few high school tests and now plans to pursue a degree in computer science. “I had been struggling with the unit circle, essentially trying to learn it out of the textbook,” Brannan wrote. “I watched your videos and it all clicked.”

In 2009, Khan turned his videos into a nonprofit called Khan Academy, and was startled to hear that no less a personage than Bill Gates was one of his fans, as Gates’s own kids were using Khan’s videos to help study.

Last year, the Los Altos, California school board embarked on a pilot program to start using Khan’s videos as teaching tools, with some additional software including dashboards that would let teachers track individual students’ progress. Khan also added gamification, including badges and awards that kids could earn through their progress. This has led to some surprising results, including ten-year-old students who are hooked on inverse trigonometry at an age when their classmates in other schools are still struggling with fractions.

One of the elements that makes Khan’s videos so effective may be the way they are done in a conversational, explanatory style. It never feels like Khan is talking down to the viewer, or over their heads—it’s as if he’s sitting next to you, putting his head together with you as he explains difficult concepts in a way you can understand.

Khan Academy has over 2,700 educational videos at the moment, and continues to add them to cover a variety of subjects. Since the videos are on YouTube, they are free for anyone to watch, and another part of the website includes exercises students can do to earn points and badges, and a section that “coaches” (such as parents or teachers) can use to track students’ progress.

This sort of site could be an invaluable educational resource for primary or supplemental homeschooling. It might also turn a tablet such as an iPad or a Kindle Fire into a terrific educational tool without needing to buy any further educational software. For that matter, I’m sure it would go well with whatever the OLPC’s next device turns out to be, at least for in English-speaking areas.

Here’s a 20-minute talk Khan gave at the 2011 TED conference about the history and philosophy behind the academy:

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.

As to why a $25 PC is needed, it simply comes down to the need to develop programming skills while still young, a skill that seems to have disappeared in recent years. Eben explains this as due to the typical hacking and experiment platforms such as the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX81 all disappearing and being replaced with the closed game consoles. Even the PC has become closed as families typically share it and kids aren’t encouraged to experiment for fear of breaking it.

There will also be a $35 version with more RAM and a network port, which the foundation expects to be much more popular than the $25 version. Interestingly, the computer will work not only with HDMI or DVI monitors, but also with old analog TVs like the PCs of the 1980s. That will certainly reduce the effective cost of ownership, as well as provide a new use for all the old TVs that people are replacing with high-def digital versions.

Will this computer “produce the next generation of computer geeks”? Hard to say. But apart from the uses in education, it could very well bring meaningful computing access to a low-income segment of the population in a way that the OLPC has not yet ever managed.

OLPC

Braben plans to use this PC to promote computer science studies in schools, giving kids venues to learn basic skills like programming and understanding hardware architecture. It will be made available through the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK-registered charity to promote the study of computer science.

Aside from promoting computer science, such a computer could be very useful in providing general-purpose computational ability to schools on a budget crunch. And it could be attractive to low-income families and others who could use a decent cheap computer. I know I can’t wait to buy one to play with. At only $25, that’s less than a lot of ordinary USB thumb drives cost!

"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. We are at the beginning of an entirely new medium."

But the article goes into a lot more detail about Callaway’s feelings on the current state of the publishing industry with regard to matters that go beyond the book. Rather than follow the traditional model of publishers just publishing and paying royalties, Callaway enters into partnerships with authors and oversees not just publication but merchandising as well. Rather than be limited to the traditional role of publishers and taking only one slice over the overall pie, Callaway and his authors “[build] ownership of intellectual property across many different forms.”

Callaway points to the Harry Potter phenomenon as being an area where the traditional publishers really lost out. Potter’s publishers, Scholastic and Bloomsbury, might have made millions from publishing the books—but they didn’t see a penny of the movie rights, which Rowling herself kept.

"The publishers had the opportunity and they did not see it. That is historically always the case with publishers, they either don’t have the film rights or consumer products rights and, if they do, they just license them away," Callaway said.

Of course, I would quibble a bit with Callaway here—it’s not as if keeping the movie rights was entirely up to the publishers. Any agent worth his salt would have told J.K. Rowling to hold onto them during the original contract negotiations, and it’s unclear whether Rowling would have been tempted by the sort of partnership Callaway would offer. She’s certainly done well enough in the traditional model. (Though I will can and will still gripe that she’s not done anything with the e-book rights.)

The article goes on to talk about how Callaway used prior connections with Steve Jobs and Apple (he published a book in 1983 that Jobs liked so much he invited its subject to give a presentation at Apple) to get in on the ground floor of Apple’s iPad launch, coming out with an interactive book app, “Miss Spider,” that was ready when the tablet itself was released. Since then, he has produced more than 20 iPad apps through the end of 2010.

Callaway has taken a long view of what computers could do for books. In 1995, he felt that the original Toy Story movie pointed the direction to the future of storytelling—but he had been waiting for the iPad to come out for much longer than that. He had been inspired by Xeroc PARC researcher Alan Kay’s depiction of a children’s computer, a tablet device called the “DynaBook”, in 1972. (Kay’s idea also inspired the One Laptop Per Child project.)

When he looks at the current state of publishing, with publishers struggling to come to terms with the growing primacy of e-books and the shrinking of their print market, Callaway sees traditional publishers moving too slowly. He has chosen to shift away from publishing printed books entirely—he licenses his titles to other publishers so he no longer has to deal with printing, shipping, and returns. When he signs new authors, it is to produce an interactive app first and work together as partners.

He says major publishers have yet to understand the changes afoot. "They are still thinking these are books in one form or another. They are not. They may originate … with a text book, but the finished product is not a book," he said.

The article then takes a slight detour to discuss Forrester analyst James McQuivey’s similar opinions on the matter. McQuivey suggests that publishers should realize they’re not in the book business, they’re in the storytelling business, and the form in which that story is told is going to change over time—so publishers should start experimenting with other storytelling forms.

"If you are a book publisher, you are asking, ‘Where do I get the money to fund that? I don’t have developers on staff and if I have to hire them I have to charge more for books, not less.’ So, in their current business model, they don’t see themselves as being in a position to change the book, so they don’t want to," McQuivey said.

He suggests that, to survive, publishers need to streamline and get rid of the overcomplicated and expensive system of shipping, distribution, and returns that can account for 25 to 40% of costs, develop better relationships with customers, and experiment with new forms of storytelling.

Then the article discusses Copia Interactive, a site where customers can not only buy e-books but can also discuss and annotate them. It also talks about what some authors are doing to experiment on their own.

It suggests publishers are now faced with the tough choice of keeping their old book-distribution business going, or developing new forms of business. Trying to do both could end in failure. Nonetheless, some publishers have taken at least tentative steps forward—Random House and HarperCollins either have or have hired executives with digital expertise, and have been trying to innovate in the digital field.

Creating enhanced content for fiction is a tricky proposition, since fiction is all about the world an author creates in the imagination of the reader. Fiction e-books may well remain largely the same as they are for some time to come. But only about 30% of the books sold in the US are fiction, and other genres have a lot more potential for enhancement.

The whole article is well worth reading—I’ve only skimmed the surface in this post. I came into it prepared to disagree about the potential for enhancement in the fiction works that are what I think of as e-books—but it’s true that other genres might very well be better-served by being able to present multimedia and other new ways to interact with the material. And the dilemma faced by publishers of whether to stick with the old or leap into the new resonates nicely with the piece I covered yesterday about publishers and pricing.

TechCrunch has an interesting post by guest author Shervin Pishevar, founder of the OpenMesh Project, in which he talks about that project’s genesis and goals. Pishevar talks about discussing information freedom with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in January of 2010, then taking part in passing along information from Egypt in January 2011.

I was staying up for days sharing and tweeting information as they happened. I had two close personal friends of mine in Egypt who were passing me information when they could. The day Egypt blocked the internet and mobile networks my mind went back to what I had said to Secretary Clinton. The only line of defense against government filtering and blocking their citizens from freely communicating and coordinating via communication networks was to create a new line of communications technologies that governments would find hard to block: Ad hoc wireless mesh networks. I called the idea OpenMesh and tweeted it.

Shortly, he was in touch with volunteers who were willing to turn the idea into a reality, and a company that was willing to kick in the designs for a tiny mobile router that could be hidden in a pocket and manufactured at a cost of $90 per unit.

The idea is to create mesh networks between people with computers or other wifi-connected devices and others with these pocket-sized routers, so the information can hop along until it can find someone near enough an uplink to the outside world to get the information through.

Open Mesh networking is a type of networking wherein each connected node in the network may act as an independent router or “smart” device, regardless of whether it has an Internet connection or not. Mesh networks are incredibly robust, with continuous connections that can reconfigure around broken or blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until the destination is reached, such as another device on the network or connecting to an Internet back haul. When there is local Internet available, they can amplify the number of people who can connect to it. When there isn’t, mesh networks can allow people to communicate with each other in the event that other forms of electronic communication are broken down. Devices consist of most wifi enabled computers and run on existing Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux systems along with iPhone and Android mobile devices. An open source mesh network further offers a scalable solution that retains low costs while avoiding path dependencies and vendor lock-in. Combined with open hardware, these networks facilitate long-term maintenance flexibility and improvements.

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because this is the same type of networking technology that the OLPC XO-1 was equipped with, to network together the students equipped with them and provide network access to all even if only a few were near the uplink to the outside world. And as the OpenMesh Project demonstrates, the idea has potential outside the field of only education. I wish them the best of luck.

Of course, this is just the beginning. As the technology improves—and getting it into widespread use will drive improvement—we could be on the way to the sort of everything-is-networked future depicted in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. Won’t that be an interesting world to live in? Hopefully once such widespread information to access becomes available, it will be harder for tyrants to keep their people down. (Of course, they’ll probably still find ways anyway, but we can dream, right?)

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 to a government source, the laptop components alone were costing the vendor Rs 5700 [US$124.82] without taking into account the import duties and logistics. The government was however planning to sell it at Rs 1500 [US$32.85] per piece. "Disagreement on the financial cost with the vendor led to the tender cancellation," said a source close to the project.

Say what you will about the OLPC’s price for the XO-1 doubling over its original plan; at least it manages to make back its investment in its devices!

So it appears that the too good to be true $35 tablet was, indeed, too good to be true. Better luck next time, India.

(Found via Technologizer, in our “Around the Web” box.)

“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 they are “the technology partner.” As a result, development of the XO-3 is now “fully funded.” He also said that the OLPC will have “something concrete” to show at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January, Buderi reports.

But the first model actually will not be the true “XO-3”—the ruggedized machine OLPC will distribute in the third world. Instead, it will be a more standard tablet intended for use by children in the developed world, based on Marvell’s “Moby” design. It will not carry the OLPC brand, whereas the ruggedized version will.

I’ve personally harbored warm feelings toward Marvell ever since I learned that they flew Stan Lee of that other Marvel out to be at their booth at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (and at some other events since). Some companies would shy away from potential brand confusion, but it takes a special kind of company to embrace it in such a clever way.

Backing OLPC gives me just another reason to like them (even if they’re probably going to end up getting a lot of their own money back as OLPC spends it over the course of the development).

(Found via Engadget.)

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:

If government wanted to do something like this, why involve India’s top engineering colleges’ name in the whole thing. Why destroy their reputation. Government is just buying a tablet, which I am sure nobody else is buying, in bulk on a cheap rate and then subsidizing it to sell it for $35.

There are many questions now, which Indian government needs to answer. I hope to hear the truth from them in the coming days.

I’ll agree with Androidos: this certainly does raise some questions about what the government thought it was doing. On the other hand, if true it would hardly be the first time the Indian government has made sweeping statements relating to cheap computer tech that turned out not to have much substance behind them.

Back in 2007, in reaction to the $100 OLPC XO-1 project (which they felt still cost too much), an Indian government ministry announced plans to make a laptop for the unbelievable price of $10 (though total costs were estimated at $47 at that point). In 2008, it was announced that it would start at $100, instead. In January 2009, they announced that it would definitely be $10 again (though at that point it was costing them $20)…then in April, 2009, India ordered 250,000 of those “too expensive” XO-1s instead.

TeleRead previously mentioned HiVision back in 2008, when the company produced the first batch of the cheap Chinese netbooks that are now ubiquitous enough to have made their way into Kmart.

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 has confidently predicted the death of the paper book within five years.

“People will say ‘no, no, no’ — of course you like your libraries,” Negroponte said. But he cited the report that sales of books for the Kindle recently surpassed sales of hardcover books.

Oh, well, if he says it, then it must be true.

TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey takes a fairly lengthy look at the tendency toward making predictions of the death of the paper book that has been growing lately (is it something in the water?) and notes that printed matter does have a lot of inertia on its side, even as e-books have some other advantages. And he is not immune to making a prognostication of his own:

I say that books are going to continue to decline in circulation as e-readers get better and cheaper ($140 is still a lot), and as the smoke-filled room occupied by the big players clears a bit. I predict a flip-flop, though: when cheap e-readers become common possessions, books will cease to be inferior alternatives and start being luxury items. The quality of paperbacks and such today really is awful: pulp paper, blurry type, flimsy covers — it’ll be no mystery when Jane Six-Pack opts for a slick, light e-reader a couple models down the line. The low-quality book market being usurped by e-readers, dead-tree-based publishers will have to change their tack, and obviously economy and convenience will no longer be a feature of their product.

It seems to be fashionable to predict the death of the e-book, but I’m suddenly reminded of the segment concerning the computer Deep Thought from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the philosphers Majikthise and Vroomfondel who make a fortune in the prognostication business based on the seven and a half million years required for its solution.

Fortunately, we won’t have to wait quite that long to know what’s going to happen to paper books.

I can certainly understand why Negroponte made the offer. The goal of furthering world-wide education with cheap computers works whether we’re talking about a $100 XO tablet, or a $35 device from India.

Still, I can’t help finding it a little amusing that the manufacturers of a (still possibly vaporous) $35 device are being offered help and assistance from someone who hasn’t been able to meet any of his own pricing goals over the last few years, and whose cheapest effort to date will end up costing three times as much.

(Found via Slashdot.)

According to a post from our sister blog Gadgetell (linking an article at The Guardian), the device will be Linux powered and come with 2 GB of memory, video conferencing capability, and a USB port. It can run on solar panel, battery, or AC power.

PC World also has an article looking at the device, and an editorial pointing out that even if it doesn’t run apps for iPad or Windows, the increasing importance of the cloud means that it will still be quite useful even with just a web browser.

Something that I’ve not seen mentioned in most of the other sources I’ve seen reporting this story (though Wired does mention it briefly) is that this is hardly the first super-low-budget laptop computer planned to come out of India—and if it materializes, it will be the first actually to do so.

Back in 2007, in reaction to the $100 OLPC XO-1 project (which they felt still cost too much), an Indian government ministry announced plans to make a laptop for the unbelievable price of $10 (though total costs were estimated at $47 at that point). In 2008, it was announced that it would start at $100, instead. In January 2009, they announced that it would definitely be $10 again (though at that point it was costing them $20)…then in April, 2009, India ordered 250,000 of those “too expensive” XO-1s instead.

It is not clear whether the $35 tablet is being developed by the same people responsible for the “$10 laptop”. Either way, if they are actually able to deliver something more than vapor at that price point, it could still teach the OLPC group and its $99 Marvell Moby tablet a thing or two.

Lee said that he bought the $275 10.1” display panel when MakerShed had them available (they sold out fast) and put it in the Acer Aspire One netbook he had bought the month before for $199. (It seems a bit odd to me to pay more for a screen than for the netbook you swap it into, but on the other hand it does have some advantages.)

Although the new display shows “better contrast, darker blacks, and a cooler tone” than the OLPC’s display:

The XO’s dual mode screen still rules in terms of pixel resolution at 1200 x 900 vs. the Acer’s 1024 x 600. It was amazing to see Windows 7, Amazon Kindle software, the New York Times web site and a QuickTime video in direct sunlight. Shades of gray and some color tints are visible. Besides the XOs and e-ink based Kindle ereaders, no other color screen device I own can be seen as clearly in sunlight. Not even the famed iPad. In the video, you can see that at a certain angle where line of sight and sun are aligned, the new Pixel Qi screen glows as if backlit!

I have to admit, it would be nice to be able to read and use my laptop in direct sunlight like that. I wonder when netbooks and laptops will begin coming with this screen as standard, rather than an aftermarket replacement?

(Found via Slashdot. Video below the jump.)