XO-2

[John Watlington]

On May 22, 2008, at 5:32 PM, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 02:14:05PM -0700, david at lang.hm wrote:
>> On Thu, 22 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>>> All this is just to say that "ease of typing English" and "keyfeel
>>> like a Remington typewriter" are not the only items on our list of
>>> desired keyboard features.
>>
>> it's not 'keyfeel like a remington typewriter', it's enough  
>> keyfeel to be
>> able to touch-type. it doesn't take much, but I haven't seen any
>> touchscreen that has any.

The loss of a keyboard is mourned.   But so much of the activities  
the young
kids that OLPC is targetting do are more manual and direct.  The desire
to maximize display area (but clam-shell, not tablet, for protection  
while being
transported) led to the proposed form factor.   I can think of a few  
ways to
integrate a keyboard with this new design.
But then we continue the huge production/logistical problem of  
generating
keyboards (and spares keyboards) for each country.

> My speculation is that OLPC is not replacing XO-1 hardware with XO-2.
> Rather, both form factors can co-exist because they serve different
> enough markets.

I think that both form factors will co-exist for several years.  2  
will face an
adoption curve similar that faced by the XO, not a substitution of  
existing
XO sales on the first day of production.

I hope that we do a good enough job on 2 that it will eventually shut  
down
XO sales, but Quanta will continue to build and sell them as long as
countries or distributors buy them.

> Is there offical thinking on this?

Not yet.

Cheers,
wad