OLPC and Intel bury the hatchet--for the children
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Nonprofit and chipmaker have faced off over low-cost laptops in the past, but they're coming together to bring PCs to kids.
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By Tony Glover, The Business, London  Dec. 7--American chipmaker Intel is using British schoolchildren and  students in secret trials of a prototype laptop. The company hopes this will  help conquer the world's education IT market.
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(InfoWorld) - When Intel says its Classmate PC is built to be rugged, the company isn't kidding. This little laptop feels ready to take the worst a 10-year-old could offer. The Classmate PC, with its distinctive blue cover, wasÂ designed by Intel for schools in emerging markets. Intel gave me one to play with for a week, offering a rare chance to take a close-up look at the laptop. Intel says the Classmate PC is "almost kid-proof," and the beefy design backs that up. The case measures 24.5 centimeters wide by 19.6 centimeters deep. With the screen closed, it measures 4.4 centimeters thick. The laptop's 7-inch screen -- which offers a resolution of 800 pixels by 480 pixels -- is guarded by a thick housing and the laptop's body has a protective bumper. The laptop itself is well built and surprisingly heavy for its size, weighing about 1.4 kilograms. Other laptops with a 7-inch screen are significantly lighter, coming in at 900 grams or less. Most of the Classmate PC's weight seems to come from its six-cell battery, which gives the laptop three to four hours of battery life. The ruggedized case probably adds a bit of weight as well. At any rate, the Classmate PC is still lighter than a bag full of books. Compared to theÂ One Laptop Per Child project's XO laptop, the Classmate PC feels better suited for the classroom environment. I had the chance to briefly try an XO prototype recently and was not impressed. Compared to the Classmate PC, the XO seemed lightly constructed and the case flexed easily. To be fair, the XO laptop that I saw was an engineering prototype, and not a final production model. Let's hope the final version of the XO is more rugged. The heart of the Classmate PC is a 900MHz Celeron M processor, not Intel's fastest chip but good enough for the job here. The Classmate PC came with Windows XP installed, Wi-Fi, 256MB of RAM, and 2GB of flash memory instead of a hard disk. As Windows XP booted up, the Classmate PC began looking for a teacher's computer. The laptop is designed to be used as part of a network, not as a standalone machine. In the classroom, the Classmate PCs can be monitored by the teacher's computer, allowing the teacher to view what each student sees on their screens. Teachers are also able to send information from their screens to every Classmate PC in the room. Since there was no network for the Classmate PC to find in my test, the system continued to boot as a standalone PC. To test its performance, I tried watching a YouTube video, which played smoothly, although at times the system seemed to be pushing its limits -- most likely due to the limited amount of DRAM installed. The Classmate PC's keyboard was too cramped for me to type comfortably, but I liked the round trackpad. In actual practice, the keyboard size shouldn't be a problem; this machine is designed for children, not adults. Among the smart touches evident in the Classmate PC design, Intel chose to place the power socket on the right side of the laptop's case, instead of the rear. This allows the laptop to be charged in a classroom storage rack that helps keep them safe and reduces classroom clutter. Another touch that struck me was the absence of an Intel logo on the Classmate PC. Intel isn't shy about branding, and it's good to see they've apparently resisted the urge to use their logo here, since I've seen pictures of other Classmate PC samples with the Intel logo. Corporate logos and marketing don't belong inside schools. Overall, the Classmate PC is an impressive product. Intel has done a good job with the design and manufacture of these laptops. Â
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Plus, Intel's still straining, revenge of the nerds, and a $13 billion Christmas present?
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Move is the latest setback for the chip Intel once billed as an industry standard.
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I used to have faith in Intel. I don&#39;t mean religious fervor, because I&#39;ve always believed that processors and other core PC components are ultimately tools.
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Blog: Recent events underscore how many companies want to help bring computing to the world's children--so long as they can make money.
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InfoWorld - On Monday, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)&#160;moved a step closer to providing low-cost laptops to children in developing nations by giving the go-ahead to the mass production of its XO laptop. However, the computers are expected to be out in October, one month later than originally planned.
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The founder of the One Laptop Per Child project claimed Friday that Intel Corp. undermined his group's effort to sell $188 computers for schoolchildren in the developing world even after the chip company got a seat on the nonprofit's board.
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(InfoWorld) - The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project is asking software coders to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the XO laptop, continuing its push toward aÂ September launch date. OLPC offered a laptop prize on Thursday for software teams who create new games during a three-day "game jam" scheduled to begin June 8 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts. By increasing the software available for the XO, OLPC hopes to encourage governments of developing countries to order more laptops, pushing the group to its sales goal of 3 million units by May 30. OLPC had collected 2.5 million orders by late April but needed to boost sales enough to order bulk computer parts and stick to the manufacturing schedule. An OLPC spokesman was sanguine about the goal, calling the date an arbitrary deadline that could also be affected by software and hardware changes as developers put the finishing touches on the beta version of the XO laptop, according to an e-mail from OLPC's public relations agency. However, production has already slipped from an original date in July and could be set back further by spiraling prices. Last month, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the price of the "hundred-dollar laptop"Â had risen to $175. Negroponte also says that his nonprofit effort is being hurt by well-funded competition from Intel's Classmate PC, also a low-budget, power-efficient PC designed as an educational tool for children in developing countries. The game-making contest marks a new effort by OLPC to increase momentum for the XO. "The purpose of the game jam is getting people together to hack for a couple of days. Hopefully this will be the first of many," said SJ Klein, OLPC's director of content. XO users already have their choice of certain games in a "Pygames" library of open-source applications written in the Python programming language, and the XO's eToys application that allows children to create their own basic media and games, he said. But in the game jam, developers could create new types of games that rely on features of the XO's design, such as mesh networking between nearby users, an integrated still or video camera, and a tablet mode for mobile gaming. "There aren't too many games right now that take advantage of mesh style networking," said Klein, referring to the XO's ability to use Wi-Fi to communicate with other users up to a kilometer away, and display them as icons on its Sugar interface. "There are networked games, sure, but they aren't sensitive to the ability to display the presence of other users depending on where they are in relation to you or to pop up on the screen when they are close enough." Beyond creating games that teach specific tasks like counting or reading, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games, according to OLPC's development guidelines. In keeping with the group's decision to use an open-source Linux OS in the XO computer, OLPC will release all games created at the weekend-long event under the open-source GNU General Public License and post them on the SourceForge site.
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The scuttling of the chip raises the risk that Intel might fall behind AMD in the race to create the fastest processors. Some saw the move as desperate attempt to deal with the fact that
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Intel said that it had chosen to withdraw from the One Laptop Per Child educational computer organization due to what a spokesman called âphilosophicalâ differences.
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The&#160;One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC)&#160;and Microsoft are working together to develop a dual-boot system to put both Linux and Windows on laptops aimed at kids in developing countries, the head of OLPC said in an interview Tuesday.&quot;We are working with them very closely to make a dual-boot system so that, like on an Apple, you can boot either one up. The version that&#39;s up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it&#39;s very, very successful. We&#39;re working very hard to do both,&quot; said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC.It&#39;s a brand new development for the XO laptops, as the low-cost notebooks are known, and came about because of Microsoft&#39;s friendlier attitude towards open source software.Microsoft has embraced the open source community over the past few years in a very different way than before, Negroponte said. &quot;And that really helps, because it&#39;s become a little bit less religious than it was a few years ago and that&#39;s really good. In the end, I think, the more people that have software and hardware out there, the better.&quot;The OLPC laptop currently runs a Fedora-based Linux OS, and&#160;Microsoft has offered a version of Windows XP for the laptop project. There had been speculation that OLPC would simply offer two separate laptop PCs, but a dual-boot system could remove the need to offer two separate laptops. Such a device could also reduce the need to have competing low-cost laptops -- running Linux or Windows -- in the marketplace. Taiwan&#39;s Asustek Computer has already launched an ultra-low cost laptop PC capable of running Windows XP, and executives at the company have touted XP compatibility as an advantage over the XO.OLPC is also working with Microsoft and possibly the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation on combining OLPC laptops with some of the educational programs run by Microsoft in developing countries.&quot;There is talk in that direction and it&#39;s directly with Bill and [Microsoft chief research and strategy officer] Craig Mundie , especially this morning, so this is really cooking at the moment,&quot; Negroponte said.Microsoft has launched programs in a number of developing countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, where it works with governments to build computer labs and Microsoft employees donate time to train people on how to use software and write programs.The OLPC Project started as an attempt to build a $100 laptop and work with governments to pass them out to kids in poor nations, but the laptop from the group, the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount at first. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope high-volume sales of the device will drive down costs.The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that the price of a PC is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how software, the Internet and communications via computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers.&#160;
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Intel Corp  said on Thursday it will drop out of the One Laptop Per Child project and resign from the board after the project's board demanded the chipmaker stop supporting other efforts in emerging markets.
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A few months after it began hacking its Windows XP operating system to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO children's machine, Microsoft says it is actively field testing the software on the tiny laptops. Whether or not Windows is the best fit for the OLPC's core audience -- children in developing countries -- is debatable.
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InfoWorld - Discussions are under way to put an Intel microprocessor inside a version of the&#160;One Laptop Per Child&#160;(OLPC) project&#39;s &quot;$100 laptop&quot; for children in developing countries, according to representatives from both parties.
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(InfoWorld) - Some of the low-cost PCs designed by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for kids in the developing world will go to people in North America. That's the result of a program the group plans to launch on Monday that will let U.S. and Canadian residents pay US$400 for one laptop to keep and one to give to a child in a developing nation. Initially, at least, purchasers won't be able to choose where the second laptop will go. "The idea is to help feed programs in the least developed countries and broaden the community of engagement," said Walter Bender, president of software and content for OLPC. By putting the laptops in the hands of people in North America, the group hopes to persuade more people to contribute content or other developments to the project, he said. The offer will start on Nov. 12 and run through Nov. 26. "We don't want to divert too much away from the developing world, so we'll do a short window," Bender said. Mass production of the laptops is scheduled for October, with the first units landing in the hands of kids around the world in early November, he said. The initial run will generate 40,000 units and production will quickly double and triple that capacity to meet demand, he said. The original plan for the OLPC project was to create a laptop that would cost less than $100, but more recentlyÂ the price has been pegged closer to $190. The $400 deal for two laptops includes some padding for the cost of sending one of the laptops to a remote location, Bender said. Â