[tt] NYT: Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience

[Premise Checker]

The NYT article says that the $100 laptops will be able to connect with 
each other in a school. So all third-world  schools need is an Internet 
connection and educational software. I don't know how good free 
educational software is, but satellite Internet will be necessary in many 
places in the third world. Here's an idea of the cost, based on Hughes 
Net's charges.

Dnload/Upload  Satellite  Monthly
Kb/sec         (one time) Fee

700/128        $300       $ 60
1000/200       $300       $ 70
1500/200       $300       $ 80

1500/300       $600       $100
2000/500       $600       $180

http://www.nationwidesatellite.com/hughesnet/?g4100

What other barriers to making every child in the world proficient in 
reading and mathematics remain to be discovered.

++++++++++++++++

Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience
New York Times, 2007.19.4
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/circuits/04pogue.html

State of the Art
By DAVID POGUE

In November, you'll be able to buy a new laptop that's spillproof,
rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It's fanless, it's silent and
it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of
heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in
video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet,
game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet
configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200.

The computer, if you hadn't already guessed, is the fabled "$100
laptop" that's been igniting hype and controversy for three years.
It's an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a
very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two
billion educationally underserved children in poor countries.

The concept: if a machine is designed smartly enough, without the
bloat of standard laptops, and sold in large enough quantities, the
price can be brought way, way down. Maybe not down to $100, as
O.L.P.C. originally hoped, but low enough for developing countries
to afford millions of them -- one per child.

The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90
degrees, it looks like a child.

O.L.P.C. slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the
machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world -- for a
period of two weeks, in November. The program is called "Get 1, Give
1," and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO
laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second
is sent to a student in a poor country.

The group does worry that people might compare the XO with $1,000
Windows or Mac laptops. They might blog about their disappointment,
thereby imperiling O.L.P.C.'s continuing talks with third world
governments.

It's easy to see how that might happen. There's no CD/DVD drive at
all, no hard drive and only a 7.5-inch screen. The Linux operating
system doesn't run Microsoft Office, Photoshop or any other standard
Mac or Windows programs. The membrane-sealed, spillproof keyboard is
too small for touch-typing by an adult.

And then there's the look of this thing. It's made of shiny green
and white plastic, like a Fisher-Price toy, complete with a handle.
With its two earlike antennas raised, it could be Shrek's little
robot friend.

And sure enough, the bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to
spit on the XO laptop. "Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows
laptop," they say.

Clearly, the XO's mission has sailed over these people's heads like
a 747.

The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely
amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the
hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough --
some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.

In the places where the XO will be used, power is often scarce. So
the laptop uses a new battery chemistry, called lithium
ferro-phosphate. It runs at one-tenth the temperature of a standard
laptop battery, costs $10 to replace, and is good for 2,000 charges
-- versus 500 on a regular laptop battery.

The laptop consumes an average of 2 watts, compared with 60 or more
on a typical business laptop. That's one reason it gets such great
battery life. A small yo-yo-like pull-cord charger is available (one
minute of pulling provides 10 minutes of power); so is a $12 solar
panel that, although only one foot square, provides enough power to
recharge or power the machine.

Speaking of bright sunshine: the XO's color screen is bright and, at
200 dots an inch, razor sharp (1,200 by 900 pixels). But it has a
secret identity: in bright sun, you can turn off the backlight
altogether. The resulting display, black on light gray, is so clear
and readable, it's almost like paper. Then, of course, the battery
lasts even longer.

The XO offers both regular wireless Internet connections and
something called mesh networking, which means that all the laptops
see each other, instantly, without any setup -- even when there's no
Internet connection.

With one press of a button, you see a map. Individual XO logos --
color-coded to differentiate them -- represent other laptops in the
area; you connect with one click. (You never double-click in the
XO's visual, super-simple operating system. You either point with
the mouse or click once.)

This feature has some astonishing utility. If only one laptop has an
Internet connection, for example, the others can get online, too,
thanks to the mesh network. And when O.L.P.C. releases software
upgrades, one laptop can broadcast them to other nearby laptops.

Power users will snort at the specs of this machine. It has only one
gigabyte of storage -- all flash memory -- with 20 percent of that
occupied by the XO's system software. And the processor is feeble by
conventional standards. Starting up takes two minutes, and switching
between programs is poky.

Once in a program, though, the speed is fine; it turns out that a
light processor is plenty if the software is written compactly and
smartly. (O.L.P.C. points out that despite gigantic leaps in
processing power, today's business laptops don't feel any faster
than they did a few years ago. The operating systems and programs
have added so much bloat that they absorb the speed gains.)

The built-in programs are equally clever. There's a word processor,
Web browser, calculator, PDF textbook reader, some games (clones of
Tetris and Connect 4), three music programs, a painting application,
a chat program and so on. The camera module permits teachers, for
the first time, to send messages home to illiterate parents.

There are also three programming environments of different degrees
of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying
code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only
study how their favorite programs have been written, but even
experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they
can restore the original.)

There's real brilliance in this emphasis on understanding the
computer itself. Many nations in XO's market have few natural
resources, and the global need for information workers grows with
every passing day.

Most of the XO's programs are shareable on the mesh network, which
is another ingenious twist. Any time you're word processing, making
music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can
click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on
the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you're
doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing,
buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in
Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum
beat in the music program. You've never seen anything like it.

The pair of laptops I reviewed had incomplete power-management
software, beta-stage software and occasional cosmetic glitches. But
O.L.P.C. and its worldwide army of open-source (volunteer)
programmers expect to polish things by the time the assembly line
starts to roll in November.

No, the biggest obstacle to the XO's success is not technology --
it's already a wonder -- but fear. Overseas ministers of education
fear that changing the status quo might risk their jobs. Big-name
computer makers fear that the XO will steal away an overlooked
two-billion-person market. Critics fear that the poorest countries
need food, malaria protection and clean water far more than
computers.

(The founder, Nicholas Negroponte's, response: "Nobody I know would
say, `By the way, let's hold off on education.' Education happens to
be a solution to all of those same problems.")

But the XO deserves to overcome those fears. Despite all the
obstacles and doubters, O.L.P.C. has come up with a laptop that's
tough and simple enough for hot, humid, dusty locales; cool enough
to keep young minds engaged, both at school and at home; and open,
flexible and collaborative enough to support a million different
teaching and learning styles.

It's a technological breakthrough, for sure. Now let's just hope it
breaks through the human barriers.

E-mail: Pogue at nytimes.com