Isolationism

By now you’ll all have heard: The OLPC is available for sale on a “buy one, donate one” basis, for $400 USD, which worked out to about $430 CAD for me including the shipping.

The fact that my current laptop is slowly becoming toast has had me spending the past 24 hours laptop shopping, and I’m frustrated as all hell.  The Eee PC looks adorable, but the tiny screen size, relatively low battery life, and cost turn me right off. It definitely looks ultra-portable—and it obviously runs Linux out of the box, which is great—but I have a premonition that I’m going to be disappointed with it and it’s going to find its way into a box alongside my ancient little HP Jornada 720. Safe to say the Jornada didn’t get a lot of use—it still works, mind you, but that screen just looks god-awful, and the battery cell is completely wasted.

Right now I’m looking at the Toshiba U300, chiefly for its small size (13″ screen) and low price tag (~$1000 for the lower-end models), but I haven’t made a commitment yet. I think I’m going to delay making a decision as long as possible—right up until I have to travel, basically, or up to the point where I snap the screen off my old laptop.

Then I remembered the OLPC.

Sure, it’s not sexy. It doesn’t have much storage. It’s got even less RAM. It won’t run “regular” applications at all.

But you know what? This thing is frigging cool. It has a dual-mode monitor that runs in both color and black and white LCD — and the black and white mode is higher resolution (1200×900) and can be read in full daylight; perfect for coding in the open sunlight under the umbrella. Oh, and in “reflective” mode, the display draws all of 0.2 watts — which means if you’re just reading text (or doing other super-low processing tasks) the battery pack lasts for nearly twenty hours. Of course there is also a color mode which runs at lower resolution as well (800×400 or thereabouts).

The battery costs $10 to replace, and lasts for approximately two thousand charge cycles. And the laptop draws such a small amount of current that you can run it directly off a book-sized solar panel. It also, apparently, has a “rip-cord”  faraday-style charging device built in, but I haven’t seen anything about that.  It’s splash resistant, dust resistant, solid state, has a built in 640×480 resolution camera, and is wrapped in high-impact plastic meaning you can drop the damn thing and it keeps on ticking.  Color me impressed.

The coolest part, though—the whole interface is programmed in Python. Be still, my beating heart.

Yes, the thing is slow, and I know I’m not going to be running Gentoo on it anytime soon — but this thing is a near-perfect machine for what it was built for—giving kids in third-world nations a stab at something we all very much take for granted—and I am so totally stoked to get to play with one myself, lime-green plastic and all. How the hell any bloggers out there could be slamming this is beyond me.

Guys, the “donate one, buy one” promotion is only going to last another 10 days. If you have the cash to do it, and want a really cool toy for yourself and/or your kid, please try to find it in your heart to get one while you can. Oh, I should also point out you get a tax-deductible receipt for the fair market value (~$200 USD) of the laptop you donate. And the offer is open to Canadian residents, in case that much wasn’t clear.