One Laptop Per Child

March 3rd, 2007

had the chance to play with a beta 2 unit of the low cost laptops from the One Laptop Per Child Project at the Creative Commons Conference that i was attending in Athens yesterday.

these beautifully engineered machines are quite impressive given their $140 dollar price tag. got a little bit confused by the completely non standard user interface, but the people involved with the project claimed that kids seem to get it more or less right away.

however, the coolest thing about the laptops is the eBook mode, which is accessed by flipping the high resolution screen around. apparently the laptops do not consume any power at all when displaying text in eBook mode, and only need a tiny amount of power when flipping pages. (find that kind of hard to believe, but the screen does not have a backlight so i also do not really see why they should consume power in the first place).

Paul Keller

Entry Filed under: platform blog