OLPC v3 concept: $75 flexible tablet | Hacker News Reader

OLPC v3 concept: $75 flexible tablet

forbes.com

27 pointsanigbrowl24 comments

"We don't necessarily need to build it," Negroponte told Forbes. "We just need to threaten to build it."

...provided we don't reveal the emptiness of our threats in -- for example -- a Forbes interview.

Joking aside, it is an interesting approach to spending non profit dollars. Exerting pressure on the market.

A market opportunity to create the best cheap educational PC is more robust then a single company/non-profit with that at its goal.

Is it safe to blame the existence of netbooks on OLPC? I wasn't following along in detail but I got the impression of a certain amount of causality there.

That's a fair conclusion, although supporting evidence is hard to locate. My best effort: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728044

People keep forgetting that keyboardless computers suck for ergonomics. Keyboardless screens such as the iPhone are brilliant if you use them for only seconds at a time, and only enter the occasional txt msg or URL.

Try writing even a modestly nontrivial Python program in them, and the hunt and peck of a touchscreen keyboard becomes real tedious real fast, not to mention the error rate due to relative lack of tactile and visual feedback. Hell, even joystick-style game controls become dodgy and frustrating on an iPhone.

In short, a keyboardless tablet is great for Twitter and ebook reading, but its value for the sort of deeply interactive learning machine the OLPC is supposed to be is a bit less certain.

I've always thought that the best rationale for the OLPC was that it could be used for development by the people that bought them. Can you really write software without a physical keyboard?

STELLA? Lego ROBOLAB?

...Piet? :)

Haha Touche.

At least in the version of Sugar that I used, development on the device was essentially impossible (as there was no usable IDE), and developer documentation was not readily available.

I'd like to see a real low-cost open hardware item that isn't vapor. Even if it's just at the level of a graphing calculator. Start with cheap and extensible and work up from there.

Did you look at Cherrypal? They made one for $99 and are also selling it at their online store (cherrypal.com). I think it's called the African Bing(?)

Found it on HN recently. The specs are pretty impressive for $99 but I haven't tried it though. Only looked at images :)

Cherry Pal is in theory shipping a $99 7" netbook now:

http://www.cherrypal.com/products.php

Also, the Gecko Surboard keyboard computer will in theory retail for $99:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/NorhTec-Gecko-Surfbo...

I lump those along with the concepts: until someone (engadget is a good bet) has held it and taken photos, it's a fiction.

What a disappointment... I was waiting for the XO2 to come out in a year (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2), but from the article, it sounds like it's been abandoned.

I think the XO2 is a better form factor in terms of usability than the XO3 shown here.

They're still working on short-term stuff also. Rwanda is investing about $300m in providing laptops for about 1.3m children: http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystor...

"Sure, if I were a commercial entity coming to you for investment, and I'd made the projections I had in the past, you wouldn't invest again," he says. "But we're not a commercial operation. If we only achieve half of what we're setting out to do, it could have very big consequences."

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything in the article about the tablet being "flexible." The photo at the top make it look rigid to me.

Of course, if it's all a dream, then I suppose we can call it whatever we want...

It's probably the reference to getting Plastic Logic to build the devices. They apparently specialize in flexible circuitry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_logic

Sorry, I kind of inferred that from the talk of replacing glass with plastic and so forth, and also my prior knowledge about v2.0, slated for delivery next year: http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/20/olpc-laptop-microsoft-tech-...

v2.0, slated for delivery next year

Ha! It's no less fictional than this most recent press release of poorly-considered renders.

I'll believe it when I see it...

I think there is a market for a net-tablet (for lack of a better name), but I don't trust the OLPC people to deliver it. And definitely not for $75.

Well, one's reach should exceed one's grasp, I suppose. I thought the original OLPC was pretty unlikely too, but they got half-way there, plus we now have a wide range of cheap netbooks available. This is imagined for 2012; with all the buzz this year over flexible screens and circuitry, that doesn't seem so far-fetched.

They're asking for an 8 GHz processor, for crying out loud. And they want it to run on one watt of power. Including the display. Optimism is one thing, but these specifications are nothing short of delusional.

I loved the concept of OLPC, but it missed one very vital component: programming instruction. You can't have a digital revolution in 3rd world countries by just handing out tools. You need to also provide instruction in how to use the tools

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