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Would you want an XO-3 as your e-book reader? And what do you think of OLPC’s current direction?
December 25, 2009 | 1:16 pm
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By David Rothman
Enjoying your new Kindle, Nook or Sony Reader? Good for you. But, whether it’s the need for improved e-book standards or an end to DRM abuse of consumers, we need to look ahead.
And the XO-3, from One Laptop Per Child, would be good to include in your view or at least consider as a possibility. Check out Forbes and Computerworld for the details. How does the XO-3 compare to the discarded XO-2 design?
What do you think of the XO-3 image to the left, gang? Notice the touch interface? Plus, the XO-3 is a lot more than just an e-book reader alone—a whole computer. My big concern would be the planned virtual keyboard. I’m not certain about the wear-and-tear on fingers and wrists. Apple apparently has been striving to address the tactile feedback issues, but I haven’t any idea if the ergonomics will work out, or how sharing Steve Job and others will be with their tech.
I wish OLPC all kinds of luck. And I won’t judge its successful by the number of units it can sell. The organization has smartly realized that it may also achieve good by encouraging others to follow its footsteps on various concepts. The OLCP certainly helped pave the way for the netbook boom.
So while some are deriding the XO-3 as a fantasy tablet—it may be!—I’d rather see visionaries like OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte overshoot rather than undershoot. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Granted OLPC has missed deadlines—the XO-2 was to have appeared in Q1 of 2010—but let’s think of the bigger picture. Without OLPC, would laptop prices have tumbled as rapidly as they did? Entrepreneurs in some ways actually advanced OLPC’s mission by undercutting its prices, and now, if the new $100 Africa netbook from Cherrypal pans out, the downward price spiral could consider—to benefit of cash-strapped people in the United States, not just overseas (yes, I do wish the OLPC had paid more attention to America’s poor).
Meanwhile I’m pleased to see the OLPC’s friends at Sugar Labs appreciating the usefulness of the ePub format standard for e-books. As exciting as the new hardware could be, let’s not forget the importance of software. I suspect that the OLPC could have been more successful with the X0-1 if the group given more priority to the usability of e-book apps for it. Walter Bender, former OLPC executive director, made a wise choice in going his own way with the Sugar interface initiative.
I’d love to see the publishing industry support both OLPC and Sugar and related activities in all possible ways. We’re talking about doing well, not just doing good. Developing countries will be among the biggest markets for books in future years, and I’d hope that large publishers could establish partnerships with local houses, while respecting of local cultures.
Related: Sugar on a Stick: What it will mean for e-books and education, a TeleRead post by Walter Bender.
Technorati Tags: OLPC,Walter Bender
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Comments:
Just embed solar cells to the thing and it will be the holy grail of reading devices, from the times of their Sumerian counterparts …
I like this direction. It’s cheaper than the same thing doubled (twin screens) and simpler than a clamshell. No keyboard means no keys to manufacture and wire up. It also means a simple, sealed slab of (they hope) plastic, darn near indestructible. Make the motherboard, connect the batteries, slap a screen on top, seal ‘er up — done.
The pictures are sheer fantasy, as are Mr Negroponte’s ‘aspirational rather than instructional’ descriptions. A flat slate like that can’t contain the sort of universal, user-replaceable batters the XO-1 has. And an 8 GHz CPU in two years? consuming 5 watts of juice? for $75? Oh, yeah, and I’ll have a jetpack to go with that, please!
But for a general direction, this makes sense. It’s terrible ergonomics for typing, but any laptop is poor on that front. And maybe the little kids who’ve never used a keyboard won’t know the difference.
Wonderful news
At less than $100 is a challenge but shouldn’t be too hard considering the production cost of gadgets we use today.
Concerns are:
Eye strain (ELLCD is not exactly easy on eyes)
Free Wireless connectivity(Whisper-net was something but…)
Contents availability(if people have to pay for contents…)
Toughness(Kids break toys anywhere I think)
So let me get this straight. The outfit that pledged to produce a $100 netbook and created a $200 one instead now plans to make something even more gee-whiz-neato and do it for $75?
You can’t design and scratch-build that kind of computer for that kind of price. Not using standardized parts. The only way that Cherrypal is able to get its decidedly-oldtech computers to sell for $99 is to give up on the idea of standardization and settle for grabbing up anything that meets a relatively loose standard of performance inexpensively as possible.
You just can’t make a touchscreen computer that cheaply. You just can’t. If you could, my iPod Touch would have cost considerably less than what I paid for it.
This emperor has no clothes.
Anyway, as this Slashdot commenter points out, the OLPC group doesn’t have any business trying to design a gee-whiz-neato computer anyway. The original OLPC was only supposed to be a means to the end of furthering education for underprivileged people in the third world. They just set out to design the XO because nothing like it existed at the time.
Well, now Cherrypal is cranking out netbooks for under $100 each. They’re not all identical—they won’t even necessarily run the same OS as each other. But overcoming that has to be an easier challenge than chasing that pipe dream of making Something Even Better.
So if the OLPC group really wants to help underprivileged third-worlders, they should partner up with Cherrypal and work out a way to put their software on Cherrypal’s hardware. Let them spend their money on that rather than letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
If they can do it, this is a much smarter design than the XO-1 was. It benefits from a few years of technology advances. The Pixel Qi screen may well make it possible, though as pond says, it’s pretty unlikely they’ll be able to include a 5GHz processor.
Crunchpad/JooJoo show that, if a bit more thickness is allowed, this is an approachable project. Maybe not at $75, but if no profit or minimal profit is assumed, and the Pixel Qi screen meets expectations, I could see this happening at around $150.
I like the sealed unit idea, though I wonder about the costs and potential inefficiencies of an induction charger. And would want to see a very long-life battery if the unit were to be truly sealed. I suspect that with a little engineering work they could make a ‘semi-permanently sealed’ unit, with a battery replaceable by someone with the right tools.
I suspect that the ‘grab ring’ will disappear. It looks more like a way to brand the item than a design for pure usefulness.
Happy Holidays, everybody!
I think XO-2 looks much better than XO-3!
XO-2 could be closed on open like laptop and live longer.
XO-3 destroys much sooner as small children are dealing with such a laptop.