GIVE ONE, GET ONE: THE XO LAPTOP

The $100 laptop is a reality; well, kind of. At $199, the XO laptop is still the cheapest ever produced, but don't let its looks deceive you: this is no toy, it is truly a technological breakthrough and until December 31st, you can donate one for a child in a developing country and get one for a kid in your family. (Offer only available in the US and Canada)

Three years in the making, the first production batch of the XO laptops is starting to reach early adopters who started placing orders a couple of months ago. Among those are education-related institutions like Elizabeth's employer, and that's how I came about one of these green critters.

It all started with Nicholas Negroponte's "$100 laptop" idea, who then founded "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC), an organization dedicated to bring low-cost portable computers to children around the world and that now counts among their partners the likes of AMD, Google, Red Hat and Newscorp to name a few.

The XO laptop has been designed for smaller hands, with bright colors that will appeal to young children but also with weather and wear resistance unlike any other in the market. It comes complete with camera, speakers and microphone, and even though it has only 256Mb of RAM applications (or Activities) have a decent performance, since it runs a light Fedora distro.

One thing I noticed is that popup windows are severily controlled within the preinstalled web browser, making it hard to navigate through certain websites. Also, if you need to display Flash content, movies will not show up at all until the content is clicked on if you are using the gnash, which comes preinstalled as well. So, you might need to install Opera and the regular Flash Player to support applications that might be affected by this restrictions.

More info on the XO's hardware and software are available at the OLPC wiki.

For donations, find more here.

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Sadly Intel have just withdrew their support for OLPC and without it reducing the price further on will be extremely difficult. I hope that they will reconsider it.