XO Laptop – First Impressions
Note (added after some feedback): This post is based on the fact that I received a unit with a defective keyboard. I’m hoping my second first impressions will be much better. Also, I have edited the shutdown time to reflect a soft shutdown.
Original post follows:
Before I start, I need to let you know that I’m a little disappointed.Not even from the fact that this machine is not as sleek as the Eee, because what it lacks in sleekness it makes up for in cuteness. But some aspects of the design are puzzling, regardless of the fact that it is meant to be an educational tool.
First, and most frustratingly, the keyboard requires MUCH pressure for the keys to register. I don’t mean that I simply can’t touch-type, but I actually have to press down on many of the keys, and sometimes pound down on them. It reminds me of the days of yore when typewriters were still being used. Seriously, my arms are tired and I’ve barely written three paragraphs (ed note: this post was drafted in the Write program in the XO, but the final edit was done on my Toshiba M300). I can’t imagine how difficult this would be for a child who conceivably has less developed muscular strength. And remember—I’m a stone-sculptress!
More keyboard woes:
- The CTRL key is where the CAPS key normally lives, and there is no CAPS key.
- The space bar is difficult to use.
- The backspace button is labeled “erase”
- The keyboard is off-center, with the bulk to the left.
Perhaps I have a defective unit, because the right-click button for the touchpad doesn’t do anything. Neither does tapping the touchpad. I do think it’s cute for the left-click button to be marked with an X and the right-click to be marked with an “O”…but the cuteness doesn’t really help the functionality problem.
The SD card slot is in a very odd space below the monitor. It can only be accessed by swivelling the monitor counter-clockwise. Although my Sandisk 512MB SD card was recognized by the XO, my Sandisk 512MB Cruzer Micro (USB drive) was not.
The “ears” are very secure in their homes, and I was a little worried I might break them while trying to unfold them. One is more secure than the other, and I scratched a finger the last time I tried to get it open.
Power, RAM usage and wireless activity indicator lights are on both sides of the monitor/top. I have not yet tested all of the buttons, but the Neighbourhood View/Group View/Home View/Activity View buttons on the keyboard are handy, and the screen rotation button works well.
If I hadn’t spent time on the OLPC News Forum, I wouldn’t have known to look for expandable media in the Journal. I suppose that’s something which would be taught to students and educators, but it just seems like a strange place for them.
The word processor does the job, and I’ll be looking forwards to the next Sugar release which fixes the file format problem. Again, I would need to visit the OLPC News Forum to figure out how to save files to removable storage, because it doesn’t seem very intuitive.
The paint program was quite basic and mimics paint programs. I could not figure out how to resize or save images (I clicked the “Keep” icon, but don’t really know what it did because I was afraid to make any changes to my original).
The built-in browser had positive and negative aspects. Positive: to maximize screen space, the address bar shows the page title when the cursor is not in that field. Negative: many functions do not work (for example, I tried to upload a photo into Photobucket, but the “Browse” button did nothing). Many users have switched to Opera, but the flimsy built-in browser is a disappointment, especially when it’s supposed to be a version of Firefox.
The Sugar interface needs some work, because it isn’t entirely intuitive. When hovering the cursor above an icon, the text which appears is sometimes a tooltip/label and sometimes a menu option. There is no visual clue indicating the difference. The bar of Activities along the bottom are bookended by scroll icons for the left and right. When you are at the leftmost bar of Activities, the left scroll icon does not change and does not loop you back to the next bar of Activities. The same goes for the right side.
A startup/shutdown time comparison (building off my post about the Eee’s UI). Note that the shutdown time of the XO is based on a hard shutdown using the power button. I have not yet been able to find a shutdown option through Sugar:
| Startup | Shutdown | |
| Eee – Easy Mode | approx 29s | approx 9s |
| Eee – KDE | approx 41s | approx 17s |
| XO – Sugar | approx 1m 37s | approx |
| Toshiba M300 – openSUSE | approx 1m 39s (but 1m 48s for the hourglass to disappear) | approx 55s |
| Toshiba M300 – Windows XP | approx 1m (but 2m 15s for the hourglass to disappear) | approx 34s |
Nicholas Negroponte has been quoted as saying “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.”
What I’m having difficulty understanding is how a keyboard which requires the same amount of pressure as a typewriter, a right-click button which doesn’t do anything, a touchpad which doesn’t respond to taps, a browser which doesn’t respond to websites the same way as the rest of the world and a user interface which doesn’t have visual cues for info-only/event-option icons is acceptable for and/or helps education.
Perhaps the resulting frustration is supposed to give students an incentive to make things better… but there are plenty of other problems for them to be solving, I think.
I’m hoping my faith will be restored after I spend some more time with the device, and when I how kids react to it compared to me. But, for now, I’m glad I bought the Asus Eee.
The XO is damned cute, though! Here are a bunch of pictures:
Tags: computers, education, eee, olpc, sugar, technology, xo laptop
I think you have a defective keyboard. No way you need to actually pound on it to get it type. As you noted I can actually touch type on mine now (took days to get to that point for me though).
Also shutdown via Sugar is found on the Home screen. Hover over the XO icon and you get the choice to Reboot or Shutdown.
Thanks, Fricka.
I did a quick search on the forum after I saw your post, and see I’m not the only one with a sticky keyboard (yay, I’m not crazy…at least not delusional!).
I’m a little sad to be parting with this one, because I like the colours. But I’d rather have a functional one :D
Mine just arrived today. I’m reserving judgement for now, but I can see the interface needs work. It’s confusing (how to quit an activity) and there’s ot much documentation (what’s a View??).
If i’s just an eucaion project, why offer it to the public???
Another XO user has a similar reaction to the user interface for Sugar
“More keyboard woes:
The CTRL key is where the CAPS key normally lives, and there is no CAPS key.”
This is where the CTRL key belongs, FYI. It is like this on UNIX terminals, and this placement is very welcome for anyone who’s had to remap their CTRL to Caps Lock to make using emacs SO GOOD. As for the lack of a caps lock, I would imagine there is probably a keyboard shortcut somewhere.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “This is where the CTRL key belongs”. On the XO, the CTRL key is directly to the left of the A, whereas all the other keyboards I use have the CTRL key in the bottom left corner.