I’m going to let you in on the inside story as to why Netbooks and the Netbook category was first created and why they will exist no longer. Nothing I am saying here is truly secret however it doesn’t get talked about much. My goal in doing this is purely educational and so that we can talk more intelligently about what a Netbook is and perhaps wrestle together with whether or not it still makes sense to use the term.
OLPC have polarised opinion with their approach to computer systems for developing nations, and now the organisation has partnered with Marvell to try to deliver on their latest XO-3 tablet. The new slates will be based on Marvell's Moby platform - as demonstrated back in March - and are unlikely to look like OLPC's ambitious, eye-catching renders.
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Sugar Labs have released v.2 "Blueberry" of their Sugar on a Stick virtualized OS, intended for deployment in education settings. Originally released in public beta back in April, the platform was originally developed for the OLPC XO-1 notebook but subsequently spun out for any Windows, Mac or Linux computer.
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“Wow! So you just pull two fingers apart on the screen to zoom in on the site?” This was my mother’s reaction last week to seeing the power of pinch-to-zoom on her new iPhone 3GS. Yes, just last week my mother, a successful business woman but a technophobe at heart, discovered that the iPhone has a little thing called multitouch! You know, that small feature that made Apple’s first phone go down in cellphone history. And her amazement didn’t stop there; she was blown away by every phone feature from the Notes application’s “cute” handwriting font to the “cool” animation of the trash can that sucks down messages like a “garbage disposal.”
The $100 price point is where computer makers have been striving to get for the education market. That price was what the OLPC first promised with its XO laptop and was ultimately unable to deliver on that promise. A computer maker from Taiwan called DMP has announced a new notebook that carries a price tag of $100 reports DigiTimes.
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It's hard to believe it is October already and the leaves are already falling off the trees. Another week come and gone and today I am back with another week in review for your perusal. We found out early this week that the Palm Pre is still headed to Verizon according to an insider. The alleged insider didn’t give any word on when exactly this may happen.
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OLPC have restarted their Give One, Get One scheme, which allows buyers to purchase an XO laptop for themselves while at the same time donating one to a child in the developing world. In fact, two options are available: $199 simply donates an XO, while the full scheme is $399. OLPC have partnered with Amazon to process the orders; in the US, XO laptops will begin shipping in 30 days.
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Elonex's One T and T+ netbooks are the UK's answer to the OLPC $100 device; at around £129 (okay, so that's $226, but we'll overlook it) they're intended for students and, for every 100 sold, Elonex will give one to an underprivileged little tyke. Under the hood things are even more modest than your average Eee PC: an Ingenic XBurst 400MHz processor and just 1GB of storage. Plugged In Blog have been playing with the One T, and come to the worrying conclusion that, as an educational device, it falls short.
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After Microsoft and the OLPC project made their OS deal official, we all knew Windows XP was going to end up on the XO-1 notebook. Laptop Mag scored an invite to check out the system, which will begin shipping with XP as a dual-boot option in September. XP runs from a separate SD card hidden behind the screen, and currently the XO-1's own internal 1GB of flash memory is not accessible. Start-up speeds are lower than promised, too; Laptop Mag have a video of it in action, but all you really need to know is that where Microsoft promised 50 seconds, it actually took 1 minute 24 seconds.
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Microsoft has released to the OLPC project the specially tweaked version of Windows XP that will be offered on the XO notebook. The new version of the machine should be available in September, according to James Utzschneider, General Manager of Marketing and Communications for the Unlimited Potential Group.
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ASUS continued their assault on the budget computing market this week, with the Eee PC 900 finally launching in the US while its Intel Atom powered sibling the PC 901 broke cover. We also saw a live photo of the Eee Box B202, a desktop version. It looks as though the rumors of a separate Eee brand could be true; the ASUS logo is notable for its absence on the new products. Meanwhile, OLPC and Microsoft finally shook hands on a Windows XP deal for the XO education notebook, and Fujitsu showed off their own Atom-based ultraportable, the U2010 UMPC complete with 3.5G WWAN and GPS.
After a great deal of "are they, aren't they?" rumor and negotiation, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project have finally agreed a deal with Microsoft to put Windows XP on the low-cost notebooks. As a result, starting from next month a Windows version of the XO machine will be available in five or six countries, with a large scale release following in August or September. However, unlike early rumors, the XO will not - at least initially - be able to dual-boot between Windows or the original Linux-based OS.
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