XO/Kindle face-off (and a few Opera and e-book tips for the XO)

Hey, OLPC, no big deal that my XO hasn’t arrived, despite my first-day order in the Give One Get One program (extended to December 31).

I’ve waited years, ever since the early 1990s, for a cheap mass-produced machine suitable for serious reading in K-12. A little longer won’t hurt. Yes, I’m grumpy that the OLPC project did not focus more on children here in the States; and like the unofficial OLPC News, I wonder about various curriculum- and deployment-related details, among other things. But what a contrast to the Kindle! It’s really designed for the affluent American elite, while the OLPC machine is for, say, the villagers in Arahuay, Peru.

Raves for XO from AP

“Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago,” reports the Associated Press‘s Frank Bajak.

Although the XO can read e-books off a high-res screen, it’s really an entirely different kind of gizmo, for different users, from the Kindle. Patient nonhackers can now even get Opera running on it, with help from handy instructions from OLPC News. I’m at least hoping that an FBReader version will be available so people can read the .epub industry standard on the XO. And meanwhile you can check out some e-book tips such as how to enter the full-screen mode.

The hands-on face-off

Speaking of e-books and related issues, wouldn’t it be fun to do a Kindle-XO face-off with both units in hand, and in fact, in an O’Reilly blog, that’s exactly what Mike Hendrickson did. His findings:

• Both can browse the Web via wireless. Hendrickson says the Kindle might pay for itself in eight months ($49 a month) in ISP bills. I’m not sure. My understanding is that the free browsing is for such activities as Wikpeida or shopping-related surfing. Anyone care to give the latest angle on this?
• The XO can handle PDFs directly, while the Kindle needs translation, and, to go by Ger’s experiences, the results aren’t always satisfactory. Of course, as I see it, there’s also the issue of how the XO will fare with book-length PDFs, and whether it will handle .epub.

• Hendrickson’s fingers are “are too fat for the [XO] keyboard, because it was designed for a younger and smaller person. But the keyboard is no more difficult to get use to than a Kindle, Blackberry, iPhone or other small device. And actually it has many function keys that take you directly to menus, scrolls, and page jumps. So one of the big wins is also the business of the OLPC. It is open. It is Linux underneath. It is not going to lock you in, down, or out.” Hello, public libraries?
• “The bottom line: Both of these devices are going to be around for along time. I hope that Amazon sees the potential of their device and realizes that OPEN is going to get it more consumers laying down $399 than a closed proprietary device. It will also ensure that a publishing ecosystem will build around them. As for the OLPC: here’s to you folks. Nicely done. A wonderfully crafted device, a noble vision, and an Open mindset. Brilliant!”

Oh, and you can hand the OLPC machine one more more advantage. Your $400 will buy two XOs—one for yourself and one for a child in a poverty-stricken place like Arahuay.