[Olpc-za] OLPC in South Africa, eThekwini

[Morgan Collett]

2009/4/2 Dirk Coetsee <dirk.coetsee at gmail.com>:
> Hello!
>
> I work for the University of Kwazulu-Natal. As part of our Open Learning
> initiative, I am interested in trying  to obtain and distribute OLPC
> laptops. However, I am MUCH more interested in the new XO 2.0's
>
> Does anybody on this list know:
>
> (1) How and where can I get the laptops?
> (2) How I can collaborate with the manufacturers?
>
> Also let me know if you are interested in joining our project!
> dc

Hi Dirk

The XO-2s are vaporware at this stage - only concept art has been
released. You can see some ideas about it on
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2. Mary Lou Jepsen, formerly the OLPC
CTO, is involved in developing the XO-2 through her consulting company
Pixel Qi (http://pixelqi.com/).

Available now is the XO-1 (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO) although OLPC
are only supplying country deployments in large quantities. The Give 1
Get 1 program through Amazon was discontinued at the end of 2008, and
the Give Many program which allowed purchases of 100+ units has also
been discontinued.

XOs are available in small numbers through the Contributors program
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program) which has been
recently updated. As part of this you could provide feedback to OLPC
on the hardware, but the current spec of the XO-1 is set in stone as
the goal is to mass produce as many as possible with minimal changes
(keyboards for different countries) to keep the costs down. The only
change I'm aware of has been to the touchpad:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Touchpad - as the original touchpad was very
unreliable in the field.

The manufacturer of the XO-1 is Quanta (http://www.quantatw.com) who
make something like 30% of all the world's laptops - including major
brands like Acer, Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo...
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanta_Computer). The laptops themselves
are manufactured in China. Somehow Quanta has a presence in ROC and
PRC - I don't know how. Anyway, As far as I know only OLPC deals with
Quanta - the public can only communicate with OLPC.

There has been talk of an XO-1.5 which would have more NAND flash
storage and possibly other improvements to the current XO-1 - but OLPC
has been very uncommunicative since they laid off almost all their
development staff in January.

Regards
Morgan
Former OLPC developer