As you may have surmised, I’m very excited about the OLPC XO laptop going on sale on Monday morning at 6AM Easter Time (be there!). However, I was thinking that other folks might not be as committed to the idea of dropping $400 on an XO for themselves and one for a child in a developing nation.

For starters, this should not be viewed as a full-fledged PC replacement any more than the early laptops replaced the desktops of the day. This is a new kind of machine that tackles a lot of basic features that have been around for years and delivers them in a very efficient way.

In a nutshell, think low-power-consumption and long battery life. Of course, the low power consumption comes at a cost of a slower processor (433mhz source) and all moving parts. So there’s no hard drive or optical (CD/DVD) drive and to keep the price down the only on-board storage is a gig of flash memory. So, you won’t be cutting your next indy movie on this, but you might write a novel (I know I’ll be trying that!). But sacrificing moving parts and giant numbers in the storage and RAM departments isn’t the only thing the engineers behind the XO have done to make it less power-hungy. The screen can switch from color to black and white and from higher resolution to lower depending on your needs at the time. Also, the processor saves energy by going to sleep after 2 seconds of non-use but can wake back up after 300 milliseconds of use (aka almost instantly).

The GUI is also a very different thing compared to what we’re used to. It’ very “plain” by the standards of a Mac or Windows user. The icons are flat, don’t have drop-shadows and animation is kept at a minimum (sorry Exposè fans!) but this is all to help out the graphics processing use less juice. The interface itself functions in a very different way because the designers wanted to allow the children who use the XO to feel encouraged to work together. So, instead of the OS being designed to allow one person to multi-task, it is designed to allow multiple people to do one or a few tasks. Have a look at a video Alexandre Van de Sande from OLPCNews.com made detailing exactly how SugarOS (the name of the Fedora Linux-based OS) would function if it was all pretty like a Mac. You can also read Van de Sande’s description of SugarOS in his post at OLPCNews.com.

So, as you can, as I said above, this is not a PC replacement. It’s more of a device for people looking for something a step down from their laptop but a step up from their smart phone.

The XO is approx 9.5″x9″x1.25″.

Of course, thinking of the XO in terms of almost a tablet PC, something you carry with you like a book or a pad of paper, you wonder how it will handle basic web stuff. It comes with a Mozilla-based web browser (like Firefox) and, according to the XO’s wiki can do things like Python, Javascript and Gnash, an open-source plug-in for Flash that is capable of “supporting vector and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActionScript™ and streaming of audio and video.” That means YouTube videos should play on the XO.

The XO’s OS can also read PDFs, pull RSS feeds, play multimedia, record multimedia, draw, process words (aka type stuff), IM and video chat. Currently, a VoIP client, a native email client, and a spreadsheet app are under development. I’m guessing they’ll be available down the road in the form of a soft/firmware update.

So, you can see just how useful the OLPC XO laptop is. It does everything basic that you already do but the battery lasts a LOT longer–some things I’ve read suggest 15+ hours, but I’m looking for a definite number and will post again when I find it.

OK, so any thoughts? So far, I’m definitely planning on being up at 6am ET to place my order at XOgiving.org. If I find out the battery life is 3 hours or less, I’ll obviously be changing my mind.

UPDATE 20080226: I’ve had my XO for just over 3 months now and with the display backlight off, the power lasts a bit longer than 4 hours. Which is roughly an hour longer than my MacBook, which is nice, but I’m a bit disappointed. The OS still doesn’t have a dedicated sleep mode, so I can’t test how long it can go asleep and unplugged. Hopefully a sleep mode will be taken from the developer version of the OS and put into the regular version.