Teleidoscope

Thu, Jan 03, 2008

XO (the OLPC laptop) compared to Harry Potter

Posted at 9:09 pm MST to Technology

It has arrived.

Weight 3 pounds 2 3.8 ounces without the AC adapter.

Weight of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix hardcover: 2 pounds 11 ounces

Dimensions (XO, closed): 9.25 x 10 x 1.25 inches

Dimensions (Harry Potter): 6.25 x 9.25 x 2.2 inches

The part of the screen that folds up when you open it is very similar in area to Harry Potter pages, about 6x9. The screen area is 6 inches x 4.5 inches, and the main text blocks on the Harry Potter pages are 4.25 x 7.

The 'ears' that stick up when you open it are very cute. It's a sort of Pokemon laptop. I need to give it a suitable name for my network.

The screen is very clear and is supposed to be rotatable both physically and in terms of the orientation of the text on the screen. I need to invest in a SD memory chip and fill it with books from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere. This will be a nice e-reader (and a good airport/airplane machine, with its long battery life). I need to look up how to put it in ebook mode, and find out how to shut down the transmitters for 'airplane' mode.

The keyboard is about 8 inches by 3, and the touchpad area (which is supposed to eventually support drawing) is quite large. It supports an extended Latin character set with about every diacritical mark I've ever heard of and all the special characters needed for Western European languages. Even upside down question marks and exclamation points for Spanish and the double pointy French quotes. I need to look into making the keyboard of my regular laptop behave like the XO laptop as much as possible: once I get used to typing diacritics on the XO, it will be annoying to have my other Linux keyboards behave differently.

There are other keyboard layouts available, and there is information on-line about switching to Thai or Russian or Ethiopian or Arabic or other supported languages. Apparently, you can set it up to cycle through any 4 supported languages, though I'm not sure whether the US international machines actually support right-to-left text yet. This seems to be the current list: English (US international); Spanish (Argentine); Portuguese (Brazilian); Amharic (Ethiopic); Arabic; West African; French; Thai; Urdu; Cyrillic; Turkish; Nepali; Mongolian; Kazakh; Devanagari; Uzbek; Pashto; Dari.

I should probably dust off my college Russian textbooks and do some playing. Mongolian is on the current list: I should take a look at that. And I wonder what the 'West African' layout looks like. (Nanette would like that one.)

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