cbd

Madelyn’s XO arrived tonight. On the one hand, awful timing; I have grading to do, and I wanna play with this new laptop! On the other hand, we’ll get to take it on our upcoming trip, which rocks.

I’ve only used it an hour or two, but I have to say I’m very impressed. If this is the first version of what will be many hardware and software iterations to follow, a lot of vendors suddenly have some work to do. The SUGAR interface, which OLPC describes as hiding the robust Linux OS, is extremely cool, and I could quite easily see myself using it on a regular basis. Anyway:

• The machine is much smaller than I expected. We bought it for a two-year old, so that’s perfect. But, wow, did I say it was small? Comparing it to my keyboard, the entire machine is about 12 keys wide. It’s about the size of a portable DVD player.
• Very solid. The XO feels very well built, not flimsy at all. The cute little antennae which hide the USB and audio ports fold in and out with nice click detents. The outside of the case is pebbled soft plastic, and the lock switches very well machined. Way better than the Dells I’m used to.
• Opening the XO is not intuitive for longtime laptop users. You have to open the laptop antennas to unlock the screen. There are two locking buttons on the bottom for the battery; I diddled with these a while before realizing what they were for.
• Form is more like a vintage laptop: the thick part of the laptop stays with the screen (which also gets the processor off your lap). The keyboard bit is quite thin with a nice size trackpad but little if any palm rest. There are two buttons, X and O (ha ha).
• The keyboard is chiclet style; feels like a remote control. layout is quite different than usual, with a lot of added keys, many interface-specific. The enter key is four times the size of a regular key. Nice to see a lot of characters for non-English languages on the keyboard.
• Besides the keyboard and trackpad, there are game-style controls on either side of the screen. Folding the screen down into “ebook” configuration makes them easily accessible.
• A button at the lower left of the screen rotates the image. Nice.
• The XO screen is sharp with good color. Most applications (activities, in XO parlance) allow quick zooming in and out. On the web browser, given the small screen, this is very useful.
• Yes, there is a terminal. Lots of other activities, too. Collaboration is built into darn near every one: you can grant access to any activity to other XO users on the network. (Wow. We’ll try this soon.)
• An activity called Journal runs at all times and facilitates tracking of other activities. Like a browser history for the whole OS, and it’s automatic. I so want this on my Linux box. And how long until someone builds a Journal-Twitter gateway?
• The OS only uses 321 MB of the 1GB flash. Switching between activities, especially the web browser, takes a little while. But once you’re doing something, the machine is snappy.
• SUGAR does away with multiple windows. One app at a time. To switch or start new activities, you mouse to any corner (or hit the key in the upper right which looks like an open square), and controls appear from all four sides of the screen (like a picture frame). Like the Mac OS dock, a line of activities is on the bottom.
• Keyboard or mouse can also trigger the home view which adds a central display of applications to the frame options I mentioned above, as well as shows network and battery status.

OK, time for Daddy to let the computer rest so its intended user can log some time with it later today.

Posted Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 1:19 am under Family, Nerdliness. Follow responses with the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.