Atilla

Yes, yes, yes! The OLPCs have arrived. 209 kilograms of them, 100 lean-mean-green-machines.

It's superb. It awfully, criminally cute. White-and-green, extremely tiny - it was a lot smaller than I expected. The battery clicked in, I pressed the power button and it started working. Oddly enough, I've no problems with the Sugar interface. It's right as it should be, for the purposes of this laptop. It also blends perfectly with the look and feel of this little gem.

The screen is, as expected - superb. It's got an amazing detail for its tiny size. Not that tiny, considering that other "simmilar" solutions provide even smaller screens. Honestly, I don't think anything below this will be usable. Then it's the magical monochrome mode. Turn the light all the way down - hello, my perfect e-book reader. It works brilliantly under direct sunlight. And if you think that this is not important - you should go out more. The screen rotates, with the touch of a button. It's the most awesome of awesome.

I finally have a machine with a decent camera too. It works and it takes pictures. I will share some here, ASAP. It also has a mic and speakers built-in, so it's a fully functional communications agent, out of the box. Small box, with a power supply in it and a 1-page instruction manual. That's all you get.

The keyboard is strangely cute. Soft rubber keys, spill-resistant, what more to ask from it. Yes, you could whine about the size of the keys, or that sometimes you don't feel if you really pressed one of them or not. But they work with no big issues for me - I'm typing this from my OLPC. I wanted this blog to come from the small green machine.

It's just so cool. In the true spirit of geekness - I'm using Opera's special OLPC edition on it. I also have emacs and mplayer on it already. I watched a movie on it last night, with no issues whatsoever. Coding in the sun will be fun too. This is definitelly going to be my favourite plane toy. It's small and easy and it does anything I want. Its schoolbag, or lunchbox, looks will draw attention for sure. I want to see how people react to it, I'm sure that I'll be getting a lot of questions.

All of us will - the 60+ recepients from Opera Software and the rest of the lucky 100 that get to share the fun of this priceless little gem. Detailed updadtes for our progress in hacking into it are sure to follow.

For those of you who don't know - OLPC stands for the One-laptop-per-child initiative. It's a nice project to design and distribute a sturdy, effective and yet cheap laptops, as an educational tool in areas that have a dire need for such equipment.

You might be thinking, either in informed outrage or in ignorance "who needs laptops when they lack food?" and I'll give you that - there's a certain point there, but this is certainly not a discussion I'd care to involve myself into. The problems of logistics and world food distribution will sadly have to wait for another day.

Now, it does sound to some as another wannabe lets-help-the-third-word humanitarian acts, but so far the project has done a lot and has developed a machine that might actually turn this nice idea into an extremely helpful tool for many people. I had the chance to see one of those cute machines almost a full year ago. I was quite curious, since the original 100 USD per machine price tag seemed a little impossible to me. I'm sure one could put a 100 worth of hardware in a plastic box, but would it be useful? Additionally - the prototype I got the chance to see was a little roughed up, perhaps seen much more miles in an airplane than I have. But it was cute in a way, despite its slight resemblance to a teletubby.

But the idea of having one of those, just for the fun of it never left me. I mean - it would only be a 100 bucks, why wouldn't I get one? I was surely not their target consumer though and the initiative didn't want to market those openly, which would kind of invalidate their original purpose. But apparently they've found the correct thing to do for someone who, just like me, would be fascinated by such a toy - they announced the possibility to purchase one machine, for the price of two. Just take a peek at http://www.xogiving.org/ . Yeah, I know - it usually works the other way around, but the idea here is that with the money for the second machine you are donating one to a child somewhere. So I'm totally up for it. I'm looking forward to get one of those shiny little things (although they're candy green) and just have fun playing with it. Or just find a kid to give it to when I get bored, I'm not exactly sure how much can be done with it before I loose interest, although I'd guess its quite a lot.

The price tag is for the whole thing is now 400 USD. The initial 100$ models just couldn't make it, so the cost doubled. With one machine to donate - that's how it sums up to the grand total. But it's worth it and that's without counting the whole warm, fuzzy feeling of donating the second one. Because although cheap and small, the OLPC has some pretty advanced hardware in it, that can do a lot.

To begin with, it has this amazing 200DPI screen. For reference - that's a 7.5 inch screen with supported resolution of 1200x900, while a 19" widescreen monitor would have 1400x900. Now - that's a pretty good monitor for a thing like that and in addition - it comes with a little extra. There's a second high-contrast, reflective mode to make the image visible in direct sunlight, which makes it perfect for outdoor use. That mode is mostly for text reading though, but that's one of the major purposes of the laptop anyway.

It also comes with an AMD Geode processor and 256 megs of memory. You'd think that's not a lot, but for essential applications with a proper OS, it's pretty much good enough. Also - that's the processing power of your Wii at home, for a rough comparison. The RAM is actually more than the Wii and it also has 1Gig of flash-memory-based storage. That means no wear or mechanical parts in it, whatsoever.

Two really sweet details remain - the first of them being the wireless adapter. This machine is a wireless router, with two antennas with pretty distinctive appearance. The included software will create for you a mesh network of all wireless devices around, making this laptop a pretty unique tool. It'll surely be a lot of fun to have a few of those around the area, all practical applications aside .

The final sweet spot is the power consumption and the recharging methods. The display and the pretty amazing Geode processor are extremely low-power, with the ability to completely suspend their power consumption when they're not in use. You can even have the wireless subsystem working independently, routing network traffic, while the rest of the system is completely powered off. The whole system is carefully architectured to have as little components draining power at a given time, giving it a potential for a lot of battery time. I wish I had a proper number to know how much that is, but I guess time will show. However - the fun doesn't stop there, because the OLPC is supposed to be powered in electricity-limited environments which basically means tons of crazy ideas. A crank, a pedal or a pull-string generator are supposed to come with the machine! Talk about alternative means of power generation. Other means of powering would be a standard electricity grid adapter (DUH), a car-battery adapter and an OLPC mass-battery charged, powered on solar panels. It's just great.

That's surely not all I can remember, but I hope it explains my enthusiasm. The guys at MIT are working on other cool things, like solar-powered mesh network repeaters. It's just so cool.

Did I say that was all? On no - there's something even better. It comes with a specialized version of your beloved Opera browser. We released the OLPC edition a while back. I sure hope there will be a new one for the launch of the project. Maybe with the synchronization features as well? I hope