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Building on its success with laptops designed for developing countries, the One Laptop Per Child project is set to unveil a long-awaited tablet at CES next week. Here’s what you get for £65:
The OLPC has been kicking around the idea of a super-affordable tablet for over a year. Originally known as the XO-3, but now dubbed the XO 3.0, the tablet will feature an 8-inch 1024×768 screen with some models also offering a PixelQi 3qi display that mimics E-paper. A Marvell Armada PXA618 chip and 512MB of RAM reside in the tablet’s ruggedized shell and will run either Linux Sugar or Android OS.
With a bare-bones feature set, the OLPC tablet should cost about $100 per unit (around £65)—up from the original estimated price of $75 (£50), but still way cheaper than virtually any other tablet on the market.
The coolest feature that the XO 3.0 can be powered by hand-cranking—to the tune of 10 minutes of run time for every minute of work. Why isn’t this available on, well, everything? I’d gladly spin a handle for a few minutes if it meant I wouldn’t have to beg for outlet time at coffee shops, carry spare chargers, and constantly dread the “low battery” notification. [Electronista]
It’s funny how all the advance stuff seems boring but having something as simple as a hand crank makes it interesting again.
So is the touch panel turned off where you hold it at the top right, or do you accidentally smush the screen every time you hold it?
You hold it buy the round handle at the top I would imagine..
If that picture represents the final product then I would buy it and keep it in the Car, it can keep the kids busy. I like the frameless screen design.
I suspect it’s just a render that was made without any relation to the real product, that thing has a bigger screen and appears thinner than, the iPad. If it is the real thing then Apple have been overcharging us even more than we thought.
The thing with the Ipad is that it does evrything it says on the box, it does it well at that. In my opinion quality counts, the user experience matters the most, if this thing looks slimmer than the ipad and is much cheaper, I think it will fall over in other areas.
At that price, it’s worth picking up whatever the specs are. Would be a great little toy and a fantastic tablet to give to kids as a first experience. I expect it’s this kind of low-cost tablet that will eventually permeate throughout everything we do to just kind of ‘be there’ like the Padds in Star Trek.
While this OLPC incentive is a good thing, I think they would serve their time better functioning as a charity collecting money and buying current available stock from India and China. I remember the original incentive to build a laptop below $99, but I think I recall the mainstream market getting there around the same time and being better.
At $100 the only cool thing is the hand crank charger, but I think I recall India having a $35 tablet on the market in October last year and I’m sure someone will sell a hand crank USB charger for a few dollars, let me google that, yes they do – so can someone tell me why this charity is wasting millions making a new product at more than twice the price of a solution that is currently on the market? The executives of this charity need to be shot and replaced. OBPCE – One Bullet Per Charity Executive.
There is some merit in what you say, but if we are going to consider avoiding waste would it not be better if they lined up front to back, that way each bullet would have the chance of killing more than 1 excutive, leading to an overall saving in bullets
However, to get back to the serious point, when OLPC started there was nobody trying to make cheap laptops for developing countries and trusting the market to just “come out” with such a thing will most likely lead to disappointment. As to the Indian tablet being under the cost of this, that is true, but it is part subsidised by the Indian Govt (when sold to Indians) and is not in anyway hardened or rugged enough to be used in many of the places where the OLPC organisation will be sending theirs.