Wow ... look at the colour of this Laptop!!!  How could the Saugeen Times resist reviewing it?  What the heck  is it?   A friend loaned me one to play with and ... well, more about that later.   Here is the hype:

A real world laptop for real world change. The XO laptop.

Many years and an infinite amount of sweat equity went into the creation of the XO laptop. Designed collaboratively by experts from academia and industry, the XO is the product of the very best thinking about technology and learning. It was designed with the real world in mind, considering everything from extreme environmental conditions such as high heat and humidity, to technological issues such as local-language support. As a result, the XO laptop is extremely durable, brilliantly functional, energy-efficient, responsive, and fun. Come take a look.

The Words: to notice are infinite, experts, very best thinking and technology and learning,  real world, extremely, responsive and fun

I understand marketing hype, but when you use the phrase "an infinite amount of sweat equity", I know you are full of beans.  I have too much respect for the word infinite.

So you think you are an expert?

A friend of mine bought one of these and sent one to a third world person that he's never seen ... good luck with that.  It's part of the deal.

I went to his house on another issue.  He was on his  Dell Laptop doing an eBay transaction when I arrived.  He asked me to take a look at this green Laptop that he had.  He said as he returned to his Dell ... "see if you can open it!"  Well... is this a test?  I refuse to take another one of those.

Opening It

He was not testing me, he was serious.  I played with it for a few minutes and finally figured out that you have to release the 'ears' as shown in the picture to open it.  Those ears are antennas for picking up wireless It also opens in the reverse of what you think it should.

Keyboard and Buttons

There is a normal keyboard layout for typing, but it's made for tiny people, really tiny ... kids before puberty for sure ... way before puberty.  You can touch one key at a time, if you are very careful.  If you are a touch typist, you'll have to forget your skill.  You can't use the kids technique of using thumbs on their text message rants because it has a touch pad and if you even drag your hand near it all your hard work of locating the cursor is lost.

They've got all sorts of buttons on the thing with Icons on them or next to them.  Across the top they have 19 buttons.  Most of the Icons mean nothing unless you've been trained or have access to the Internet by using another machine.  It did not come with a user  manual..   You can look up how to get started on the Net, but it's not easy.

It is supposed to be multi-lingual so there are some strange looking things on the keys.  There is also a key labeled fn. They toss in some English once in a while like Home and pg up pg down, etc...kind of defeats the purpose of the lingual stuff, but not too much.

You know you are in trouble with the 'fn' key though because this means that you can change the key meanings to something else, if you are an expert.  There are two hands on the keyboard too. 

The space bar has something on the far left hinting that it might have some use.  Maybe the space bar is a rocker button too.

Touch Pad

I have to admit, I hate a touch pad instead of a mouse, but this one is really in the way.  With the tiny keyboard, you are always screwing up your hard won position for the cursor.  At one and the same time this pad lags the cursor and will jump around, if touched. That's a bad combination and sours me right away.

 Most annoying  -- indeed!

The Screen

The screen is small, but that's what you'd expect.  You can't have everything!

There are holes that are clearly speakers... that's ok. 

There are 10 buttons on the face of the screen. and a bunch of light indicators, some with Icons that might mean something to an a space creature, but not to me.

One button turns it on, but when you first approach the machine it has a friendly green light on, but nothing is there... the brain is dead. It's not really on in the true sense of the word.  To turn it off you have to hold down the turn on button for 10 seconds.  I guess they ran out of energy to put in another button.

The User Interface

When you first turn the machine on, you are presented with a bunch of Icons that are on the top and bottom of the screen. They appear and disappear annoyingly when you move your cursor into certain areas, making the screen smaller still.  Some Icons make sense, but others make no sense at all. 

For example, to get connected you have to hit a circle with a white background and a bunch of black spots on it.  This is supposed to mean your internet neighborhood.

If you poke this you come to a screen that shows X and O at the centre... that's supposed to be you and you see a bevy of little circles mostly blue, but in my case one is green.  It's larger. It is my Internet Wireless Hub made by Cisco with the brand Linksys..

(next column)

If you poke at this, then the machine does something because one of the lights on it blinks like mad indicating it's off working.  If you don't know the interface, you don't see a change, but there is one!  There is a tiny white circle around the big green filled in circle. That indicates you are connected to your wireless network.  Too subtle for me by a long way.  If you hover the cursor it says something like Linksys in my case and Disconnect. 

This tells you that you are connected to a Linksys hub and you can disconnect, if you want.  This is in plain English as the other subtle white circle is lost on the first time user.  You have to assume that if you are allowed to disconnect then you  must be connected.  It does not say you are connected in English, French or Hindi.

Now you have 18 Icons to deal with. Some are easy to understand like a drum and some musical notes and a paint brush.  Some of these don't make much sense except to a computer specialist and should be sub-category items..  For example there is a Snake and if you hover the mouse it says Pippy

It leads you to something that looks like a programming language which is neat.  So I can learn that with no problem.  This goes on and on though and it looks like I need to go to the Internet to find out more.

Oh, ....  they allow you to use Python which is a modern programming language and so if you know that, then the snake makes sense when you get there.  It would make no sense to my friend who was still on eBay or his grand child who is 4.  Neither of them have ever programmed anything except maybe the sprinkler system in the case of the adult.

I found out how to navigate the Internet and was able to bring up www.saugeentimes.com.  The browser is not too friendly, but it works.

The machine is pretty slow  to react from  application to application, but that can be handled in the future with more memory and a faster chip ... no big deal

One thing that I don't like about the  machine is the  multiple ways to do the same thing.  Many interface designers seem to like this, but to most first time users, this gets in the way of learning.  It's like teaching a kid to throw a ball this way and that way and another way and yet another before they know the best way.  Why not do it right and do it one time?

Also, there are already two user interfaces one on the PC and one on the MAC.  We've learned to live with them and they are surprisingly robust in adding new ways to do things from a set base.  It's comfortable to know what's under the pull down tab 'File".  You can forget that with the XO.  I know what happened here with the Graphical User Interface of the XO. Here is my calculated guess:

This machine runs Linux a 'free'  and open software operating system, that is really not free.  These guys are against Bill Gates and Steve Jobs because they developed something and sell it so they tried to invent their own.  They have a rabid group of users, but they are very small.  XO is built on top of this, but has it's own quirky interface.  I'm not against quirky... after all I use BLENDER.  Good luck to the XO guys, I won't hold my breath waiting for the world to change from fast and easy to use to slow and painful.

The REAL World

I spend some of my time trying to help seniors and children.  The Seniors call and ask me questions.  I just got one before I typed the words 'The REAL World'.  It came from a very smart man who wanted to enter a new name in an address list and sort it using MS Word.  I will have to go over tomorrow and show him.  I've shown him this in the past, but this is his first real time to use what I've told him and he is stuck.  In my wildest dreams, I can't imagine my friends making much progress on the XO out of the box.  Way, way too confusing.

How About the Kids?

This morning I visited one of the kids that I sometimes tutor.  He is in 9th grade.  He and his friend were happily playing with his computer.  He got hold of an old IBM machine and over time added memory to it, a high speed connection to a hub, a flat panel display with HD format etc, etc....  He's got Ethernet cable running all over the place and he knows what he's doing.

Does he need the XO? .... No!  It will slow him down.   Could he learn it?  Yes, but learning yet another user interface is NOT what it's all about unless it is better.  What it is about is doing more in depth work and/or getting routine things done like the address book thing for my adult friend  The teen has learned a lot by playing inside the box.  This would be no fun with the weatherproof XO ... can't add too much although it does have a USB port.

The Target Market

2,000,000,000 children in the third world for $100 each -- that's the Market!

The NY Times decries comments like I've made above as missing the point.  So what if you can buy a Windows based Laptop for $400.00?  So what if the XO does not have a hard drive, any CD or DVD drives?  So what if it looks funny?  So what if it does not run standard applications like Word and Excel out of the box?  So what if $100/child is a huge price for kids who are starving?

I agree with all that, it's just that the darn thing has some big flaws and I think that people like Intel have recognized it and are doing their own.  Even though people complain about Bill Gates, I think his foundation knows a bit about both computers and doing some good.

The Market is sure there.  This should be viewed as a first step and not a bad one. Really the first step for the 2 Billion is no wars and some food.

It's not a machine that my smart teen friend needs.  He CAN'T experiment with it like he can a PC.  With the PC he can learn, play and build.  He's put together a couple of computers by himself already.

It's way, way too complicated for my smart adult friend who I will help tomorrow.

As for my friends 4 year old grandchild, I will show her grandfather how to get started with her.  I'm not looking forward to that.  She can already draw with it and the built in camera is not bad.

I might buy one to just play with Python and see what I can do.... naw... I won't.

Why do they call it the XO machine?  Well, if you rotate XO 90 degrees it looks like a child or so they say!  Which way though :) ?  Of course with the O up!

Does that give you an idea about how opaque these people are?