Josh Russell

I’ve been lucky enough to get myself an OLPC via a colleague in the US. Currently you can only get one if you have a US credit card and a US address for delivery.

They’re only really available in bulk to third world governments (not happening much yet, but that’s the idea), but I got mine on their “give one, get one” scheme, which means I really paid for two, I got one, and the other went to a kid somewhere. This is a good thing, not just for the kid, but for growing the developer community. The early buyers of these are going to be people like me, that live on the geek peak, the early adopters. We’ll review it, feedback on it, and develop for it. Genius idea to let them be available to us!

I’ve been playing with it a bit this evening and thought I’d share my initial thoughts. But in short, it’s great, I’m loving it :)

You can watch a video of me turning it on for the first time and I’ve taken some photos as I unboxed it. In the grand geek tradition when a new gadget gets into the hands of someone like me!

Size wise it’s smaller than it looks in pictures, it’s about two thirds the width of my MacBook, the same depth, and about 5mm thicker. It’s also heavier than i expected, and it’s not all in the battery, that’s actually surprisingly light. It’a smooth plastic, but the dimples help you grip. The two aerials are rubber, as are the four feet. It feels really tough, and if you saw David Pogue’s review you’ll know it can take some punishment!

Every detail of the OLPC’s design has been really thought through well, some of the highlights for me are:

The aerials act as the clips that keep the laptop closed. This is good because it means that the aerials are always extended (they need to be to open it up) and that the otherwise hidden usb and audio ports are exposed. Even the little clips that hold the aerials in position are tough, they’re going to be used and used, so this is good.

Status LED are visible from both sides of the screen. This means you can tell if it’s on when it’s closed, which is great.

Where the screen is attached to the base you can see it’s been built to last, it’s reassuringly stiff, and there is a slightly exposed solid metal pivot support.

The battery clips are clever. One is sprung to snap shut, while the other will stay open. This means you can easily remove the battery on your own without having to struggle to hold both clips open and then use your third hand to remove the battery.

There are no vents. No fans. No big moving parts at all. All this means better protection from grit and dust, and of course less moving parts means more reliability. It doesn’t get noticeably hot either.

The dimples around the handle are shaped like the XO logo :)

On the inside there are lots of buttons! On the screen you have directional controls and play buttons, both much like a games console controller. There’s also the power button and a button that rotates what’s displayed on the screen. This is good because when the screen is physically flipped you might want to hold it differently, to just read or browse maybe. When flipped like this the directional buttons become really useful for scrolling and browsing.

Wow there are a lot of points to cover… Also on the screen are the camera, microphone and speakers.

The keyboard is rubbery, so it’s well protected from the elements. To a degree. It feels like the piece of rubber under the keys on some older mobile phones. If you ever took apart an old Nokia 5 or 6 years ago, you’ll know what I mean. It makes touch typing a bit tricky, but that’s probably more due to the size of the keys. I would say they’re 8-10mm squared. There’s no caps lock! Instead it’s all unix, there’s a ctrl key where the caps lock should be! Cool? There are two keys, one either side of the space bar, with hands on them. I don’t know what they do yet, anyone? Then along the top are several keys for brightness and volume, and also some that take you directly to the four main areas of the UI. These are your local wireless neighbourhood, the group you’re in, your home screen (which also acts as an application switcher), and the fourth button shows the frame of navigation buttons that will sit on top of any app you’re in, so you can navigate. This is clever, because on a small screen why should you have space taken up by things that aren’t crucial to the task you’re in the middle of performing?

There are too many details in the UI that have been thought through so well. I can’t list them all here, I might do another post to cover that as I discover them. But it’s those details that make it sweet to use. Lots of the lessons about UI that we’ve learnt over the years have all been considered.

One last thing before I go to bed, it’s 4am, when did that happen! The screen is great. It’s not the best colour, or contrast, or resolution. But the experience it provides, is just, well, right. It’s very clear and doesn’t feel too small. It also seems to be just as tough as the rest of the machine. One great feature can only really be appreciated in bright light. It might do this automatically, I’ll check, but if you turn the brightness down the screen changes mode and goes greyscale and high resolution. With text, I couldn’t see the dots. It’s the sort of quality I’ve only seen on Japanese mobile phones. Almost like that e-reader thing from Sony.

So all in all, I’m really impressed! I’ll do a post after I’ve had a few weeks to play with it. I want to try and do some real tasks or work with it. I want to see how useful it will really be. And also how well thought out the collaboration tools are.

oh and yes, it runs flash. But I had trouble getting it to play a video on youtube. It’s the click-to-active flavour of flash that IE does. Interestingly the browser feels like Firefox (the standard server not found error looks identical). Here’s some information about the browsing options.

If you want me to test something in particular, let me know. I’ll probably have it with me at geek events around Brighton, so if you see me come and try it out…