We received a few XO Laptops today as part of the Give One, Get One initiative through the One Laptop Per Child organization. Marc, Ken, and I popped them open and began fiddling around with the capabilities. Our first impression was that these are clearly made to limit adult usage (tiny keyboard, tiny screen), and to inhibit market value. But the UI is very straight-forward and after twenty minutes I think we were all literate in the basic menus and functionalities.
I’m sure I’ll add more later, but wanted to make a quick, enthusiastic, thumbs-up and provide a handful of photos of the XOs on flickr.
Hey, how easy/hard was it to get them on the network? What was the experience of browsing the web like? Would love to hear more observations about your experiences with XO laptops. Cheers, Scott
Mesh networking is integrated into each XO laptop and so sharing stuff from computer to computer is simple. However, we’ve still not been able to connect to the Internet through any wireless network, but you can bet we’ll keep trying!
Wow, that is an amazing statement, “we’ve still not been able to connect to the Internet through any wireless network.” Definitely keen to hear updates on that.
I must confess that we’ve probably spent a total of an hour trying (collectively), and we have yet to dive into the manual…hmm, isn’t there a pithy saying about that as a last resort?
One of our college administrators stopped by, saw the XOs, was excited, decided to take one to the President’s Administrative Suite. Hope they see past the toy-ness of these without excessive scrutiny.
This is stupid:
“Currently, we do not support WPA-enabled WiFi access points;”