China devices, XO-3

[Carlos Nazareno]

Hi guys. As I was walking in one of the less upscale malls over here
in Manila and passed the hawkers & vendors selling cheap cellphones &
gadgets from China, what caught my eye was that they were now selling
small netbooks, the domain of computer stores.

I checked 'em out because one of them was running what appeared to be
completely Win98. Wasn't able to tinker with it much, but it according
to the vendor it was running WinCE (haven't touched one of those
devices actually since the early 2000's) so it was very surprising to
me. Is that what WinCE looks like now?

Not sure what speed it was running, but I could launch the command
prompt & it had the proper PC windows directory structure & stuff. It
had 128MB RAM according to the stall owner and could support up to a
16GB SDCard. Not really enough to surf the bloated AJAX-laden internet
we have today, but good for typing documents and you can stick in .Txt
or .RTF ebooks and other stuff that could be run on a circa '96-98 PC.

At $90 it was very interesting. This was what I was talking about when
I said OLPC will be battling it out with cheap devices from China, so
OLPCs needs to step up the game, especially with applications.

Here's another thing that caught my eye: beside it was an Android
tablet ($80) that was turned into a netbook in a way similar to the
OLPC by having an external keyboard attached.

You know how most people now carry their iPads or Samsung Galaxy tabs
in leather cases? That was the clever part with this Android
"netbook": It was packaged in a leather case which you could stand at
an angle and on the opposite side of the case was a USB keyboard that
was attached to one of the Android tablet's USB ports with a thin
unobtrosive cable.

Pretty clever :)

Anyway, that's something that could possibly done with the XO-3 in the
future... because typing on tablets still currently suck and can't
beat keyboard speed :P

(touchscreen really does change the game so can't wait for the XO-3!)

Anyway, these devices don't have all the features that the XOs do, but
they've done it: the sub-$100 laptop.

Congratulations OLPC. You got the ball rolling and finally the world has it.

It can be done, it has been done. Success! :)

With some time + economies of scale, I believe OLPC in Peru can do it too.

To more innovation. Rock on!

-Naz

-- 
carlos nazareno
http://twitter.com/object404
http://www.object404.com
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core team member
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poverty is violence