The future of OLPC XO laptops

OLPC scraps dual screen XO's, offers XO 1.75 instead

Future of OLPC laptops

A lot of buzz was created about OLPC launching a dual-screen XO2 laptop/ tablet. Though this project always looked a bit more ambitious then realizable, OLPC has finally opened its eyes and has decided to embrace the reality. The company in its latest statement said it will shed the plans to launch the dual-screen XO2 tablet instead it will come out with a “model 1.75” that has a design similar to the current OLPC XO but gets a boost from a faster ARM processor.

OLPC seems to be in full mood to revamp its line of XOs and says that model 3.0 will have a “totally different industrial design, more like a sheet of paper”. That model shall include some really aspirational aspects like sturdy hardware:- unbreakable, waterproof enclosure apart from offering some colorful variants, thickness of only a quarter, reflective and transmissive display with no bezel. It’s also being projected as consuming very less power, of only 1W to be precise. The company is eyeing to offer the tablet at a stunning price of $75 by 2012.

OLPC says it is still driven by its motto of providing a 1$ per child per week to buy, maintain and connect the machine. The company is going all out to wage a war against Intel saying its Classmate series is aimed at hurting its prospects as “One Laptop per Child” campaign will seriously affect its sales efforts on OLPC's participating countries. In an exclusive interview, the company founder Nicolas Negroponte said that "Yes, Intel has hurt the mission enormously," Intel is engaging in the All-American game of catch-up to the OLPC thought leadership. Intel is increasing its focus on the developing world as a real market, by developing new computing products like the Classmate PC. It is also centering the World ahead program on the developing world outside of India and China. Last but not least, OLPC has broken Intel from its Microsoft myopia, spurring a Linux Classmate PC.

Now the real winners in this competition are the people in the developing world. Two or three years ago, neither Intel nor AMD considered them a worthy market to develop product for. "Emerging markets" would get the developed world's end-of-life products, seconds that were soon to be obsolete. Now these economies, especially their educational technology industries, are about to leapfrog into the future with clock-stopping hot technology.