Yaacov’s insights were fair and well-presented. Although most of the criticisms OLPC endured recently were due to their dispatch problems, Yaacov digs deeper, asking what problems OLPC was trying to address, what engineering challenges had to be overcome, and what other challenges were still unsolved. It seems the biggest issues yet to be overcome are training for teachers, accessibility to related technologies (e.g. an internet connection, electricity), and language and cultural barriers. For an organization which has said it’s an education project, not a laptop project, I find it odd that they have made so little headway with those challenges in comparison to the work they have completed on the XO laptop itself.

My first impressions of the XO had been near scathing, due mostly to a defective keyboard. The keyboard on this second unit is noticeably better, but also still noticeably more sticky than the one on my Eee or Toshiba. It does force me to type with my wrists up, both because it is the only way I can get close to my standard typing speed and because it doesn’t cause my wrists to accidentally trigger the touch-pad. The space-bar is still unusually difficult to register.

This XO seems to have shipped with an updated version of Sugar. I have not yet browsed the forums and wikis to learn how I can confirm that, but I do notice that the interface is a bit different from the first time. One major improvement is that clicking a “Browse’ button on a website will actually trigger a browse window (which I couldn’t get it to do last time).

Some other noteworthy items:

• the default system time does not match my actual time zone, and seems to be about 16hrs ahead (I will need to figure out how to fix that)
• still no right-click functionality, even with a USB mouse
• the SD slot seems to have more resistance on this machine than my first one
• image browsing is clunky, at best (must go to the journal, view the list of items, then launch each image in a browser)

The keyboard is still the most difficult thing for me to deal with. At Yaacov Iland’s talk yesterday I met Jason Shim, a fellow G1G1 donor who had already received his laptop. I brought my Eee with me, and upon using it, Jason remarked on how much better the Eee’s keyboard is compared to the XO. I’m glad it’s not just me! A summary of the presentation will come in a few days (probably after Jason uploads the video he took).

If it was almost love at first sight with my Eee, my relationship with my XO is definitely one which demonstrates persistence and determination.

This will take place tomorrow, March 26, 2008, from 7-8pm. Click the link above for details and to RSVP.

I’ve been mulling over these thoughts, and am trying to make some sense of why and whether physical output is fundamentally different from intellectual output. It is difficult to penetrate this because it suffers from similar philosophical challenges as the link between the mind and body.

Issues of copyright are seeming to develop more shades of grey in the differentiation between the ownership of a thing and the copying of an idea. Copyright law generally prevents ideas from receiving protection, but whether it’s a question of basketball, wanting to be someone’s boyfriend, toilet paper or other silliness, people are pushing the limits of what can be protected by copyright and what can be owned.

The problem is perhaps how easily ideas can now be stolen from creative persons to be made into the fortunes of the business-savvy. One of the recent examples of this is OLPC‘s XO laptop, which is threatening to be another Atari 400 or Commodore 64. Although it would be difficult to successfully argue that the concept of an inexpensive and small portable computing device was “stolen” or “belonged” to the pioneers at OLPC, their literal inability to deliver the XO is suspected to be a factor in the departure of some of the major minds behind the project.

Of course, an idea on its own is almost completely useless. Whether it is political, philosophical, artistic, technological, musical or otherwise, an idea which never gets past the conceptual stage is little more than exercise for your brain. But how do we find a balance between rewarding the birth of new ideas and allowing people to stand on the shoulder of giants?

After I returned my XO due to a defective keyboard (with hopes of getting one that works), I also ended up exchanging my Eee for another one because it had a warped spacebar. The new one also has a warped spacebar, but it’s not as bad. Neither had any performance issues, and the problem seems to be widespread.

jkkmobile and EeeUser.com are reporting that Asus is planning to make an Eee with a touchscreen.

Apple released the MacBook Air, and entrepreneurial laptop sleeves and minimalistic ones are already making their rounds in blogs, reminding me of the case I “made” for my Eee last week (798 views on Instructables as of the writing of this post!). So far, thinking of an uber-creative case for the XO has been quite daunting… and the OLPC laptop strap idea will be difficult to outwit.

Crave and BBC reports that NASA is thinking of creating a virtual world.

The MAKE blog has some articles about 3D printing:

• Kiosk – Sci-Fi tale of 3D printing, fabbing and more
• Fabaroni: a homemade 3D printer
• Sci-Fi objects and more made with a Spectrum Z510 3D printer (photo gallery)

A 45-minute wait and a 10-minute call later, I’m set with an RMA number and am extremely sad to need to part with the XO so soon.

The good thing is I’ll probably be able to write a much less negative review of the XO once I get a properly-functioning one. It’ll take 2-4 weeks for them to ship me a new/fixed one after they receive it, so I think I should have a new one by March.

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:

1. The CTRL key is where the CAPS key normally lives, and there is no CAPS key.
2. The space bar is difficult to use.
3. The backspace button is labeled “erase”
4. 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:

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:

“As of last night (Jan. 9) we have successfully imported all of the Canadian orders into our system (except for the PO boxes.) We will be shipping out the orders tomorrow and they should pass the border over the weekend, for in country distribution starting Monday.”

I’ve checked the status of my shipment on the laptopgiving.org website, and there’s nothing showing yet. This is promising, and I wonder what it means for actual delivery dates in Canada. I feel like I’m being both optimistic and cynical by expecting to have mine in my hands by the end of next week.

What’s baffling is the post shows with a time-stamp of Fri Jan 11, 2008 12:02 am, so I’m not sure from where it’s being posted…

One user on the forum posted a very thorough review of the XO laptop, profiled the issue of Write being unable to save documents in the .doc and .odt format properly. Some more searching resulted in little information about a replacement program which would handle either of those formats (or even .rtf). This caused me to have some second thoughts about whether I really wanted to keep the laptop, or try to resell it on eBay and get an Asus eee instead. I was (and still am) fully willing to accept the trade-off of a larger device for the geek-chicness of the XO laptop. But the laptop would have been useless if I couldn’t transport any of the documents to another computer. Although something like Google Docs is theoretically an alternative, it’s useless if I can’t get access to a reliable internet connection (which is often the case when I’m travelling, even to a big city like Toronto).

After agonizing over the issue and tracking some of the auctions on eBay for the XO laptop, I decided to ask the other users if they have tried to open the Write documents in Abiword (Write is a derivative of Abiword). I’m so glad I did that, because I was directed to the problem ticket for that issue, which is supposed to be resolved in the next update for Sugar. A quick survey of the tickets for Write showed that the OLPC development team has been very responsive to all of the issues.

It’s good to know that the developers are working so diligently on future releases of Sugar. The shipping problems were a little scary, but seeing the progress of the software is entirely reassuring.