All the World is a Laptop
I recently came to grips with the fact that I would’nt be getting a laptop this December from the One Laptop Per Child, give-one get-one program. While it was not necessarily cost prohibitive, the $400 dollar price was simply money that would be better spent elsewhere this year. I must say, though, that my grip was recently loosened a bit when I found out a friend of ours brought one for their family.
We had no idea she had purchased one until our daughter saw it, called me and gave me the scoop. I begged and I pleaded and thankfully our friend was kind enough to share her wonderful little toy with me so I could poke it and prod it for a bit.
The scoop:
The piece is absolutely exquisite in its design. It’s small, light and easy to hold and comfortable to carry around due to its built-in handle. The colors are a nice green on white, which remind me a bit of the clamshell iBooks of long ago, but they don’t look dated, which I think is because it’s a flat plastic color vs. a gloss.
It has a ton of connectivity built in with two USB ports, a Firewire port and an SD card slot built in (rather inconspicuously) underneath the monitor. The monitor itself has a near 360 degree swivel and can close with the screen face up or face down.
One of the things I loved the most about the laptop was the the unix OS. It’s all open sourced, has a very futuristic, abstract look to the icons and UI elements. It’s full of really smooth animations and fun iconography. The machine does come with a slew of pre-loaded apps that make it a fairly decent tool for things like internet surfing and word processing.
Overall, I loved most everything about the laptop, and I think it has lived up to everything they were setting out to accomplish. My only gripes are the fact that it only comes with 1gb on onboard storage (understood since there is no internal hard drive, but I would at least have thought there would be like 8gb of storage given the plummeting prices on SD media). It also comes in at a paltry 256mb of RAM, which from a quick inspection I could not see a way of easily upgrading without opening up the case.
Those things aside I was left with the warm fuzzies when I got done with my little investigative tour, and found myself with a renewed commitment to pick up one of these little bad boys come the middle of the year when they are offered again. If you are interested in some more shots of this little darling, you can check out my Flickr page.