New XO-3 Announced: Just a Marvel Moby Tablet, Re-branded (Yawn)
Posted by Wayan Vota on May 27, 2010
Marvel’s $100 Moby tablet
Back in the day, One Laptop Per Child was innovative with its technology. It came up with a low-cost, durable, Open Source laptop for education when no one else would. And in bringing the XO-1 to market, it changed the technology industry.
That OLPC is now long gone.
In its place, we have a shell of a company. They don’t do software anymore – that’s spun off to Sugar Labs. They don’t do deployments anymore – that’s the country’s responsibility or OLPC Foundation (whatever that is). And now OLPC has just given up on hardware innovation.
via olpcnews.com
Hit up that link for more info about the “new” XO-3.
Back in November of 2005 I blogged for the first time about OLPC and their proposed “$100 laptop” that they wanted to sell to developing nations. Two years later I was among the first in the world to order my own XO-1 laptop, which sadly had doubled in price, but hey, who thought they could really do $100? The point is, I’ve been a fan of the OLPC effort from day 1. However, after getting my XO-1, I discovered a few hardware flaws and found myself underwhelmed by the choices made by the guys behind OLPC and came to the conclusion that they’d lost their way.
The good news is that untold numbers of kids in developing nations have benefited from having access to these computers. The bad news is that all that made OLPC different from any other charity organization (innovation, vision and the belief that technology can make a positive difference) is gone—not because any of those differences didn’t serve them, but because they chose not to embrace those differences.
As Wayan Vota, the guy behind OLPCNews.com, said in the above quoted post: “It is sad news for all of us that remember that original OLPC. The OLPC that could push an industry create a whole new form factor overnight – the netbook.”
It’s true, back in 2005, all that we had that was vaguely netbook-like was the UMPC—which was just a really small laptop with current specs. OLPC had the balls to suggest that computers didn’t need all the bells and whistles to be tools of learning (or even perfectly reasonable tools for any number of things). They were right—so right that an entire new genre of laptop came into being.
Hell, I wonder if we’d even have the iPad if it weren’t for OLPC and their XO-1.
