My XO first impressions

OK, I'm addicted to my XO laptop. I participated the OLPC "Give 1 Get 1" program and received my XO just before Christmas. I'm very glad that I did since as an advocate for open-source software, I definitely love this move toward OS software AND hardware to address the unique problems of educating children across the world. That being said, I was also very excited to get my hands on one of the little green devices to put it through it's paces.

What do I think? Well, the XO as a box is just plain fun! There are a few rough spots in both hardware and software. First, I agree with most people that although the keyboard is quite water resistant, it is also very difficult to type on. I'm going to point out that I'm a fat-fingered 40+ year old so this criticism may have no application to a bunch of 6 year olds pounding on the little keyboard. For an adult though, it's just plain tough to get words into the box. The rest of the system is just great. The display is beautiful and crisp. I love being able to turn the back lighting off and still have a totally readable display. The wi-fi reception on my box has been great assuming that WPA encryption is off on the router. No complaints.
Now, on to the software and OS itself. Well... let's just say that the XO is currently a work in progress. There are quite a number of features that simply do not work at present. Some examples are:

• the brush size keys on the keyboard are inactive
• the touch sensitive pad does not work (although the main conductive pad in the middle for mouse movement is just fine)
• The various buttons to the left and right of the screen have limited use in the current version of the eBook reading program
• The famous "code" peeking key on the keyboard is not activated

There are a number of other minor issues here and there but most are just annoyances. Another example is that the current terminal program does not allow you to past in text. Given that the keyboard makes it torturous to enter long strings of directory paths, etc. this is a big pain since I often find myself wanted to paste in a quick one-liner from a web page into the terminal. Oh well, not critical, but just a factor.

What I find most exciting about the laptop is not its current state but its potential. I feel like I did when I sat down in front of my first Macintosh 128K (yes, I do remember that and was alive back then in 1984). The potential of that little box was palpable and I get the same feeling with the XO. When I'm asked what I think about the laptop, I summarize it as "It has some problems right now, but basically it's very usable and I can see such enormous promise that I'm a huge fan." If viewed in that light, I think most would agree that the OLPC achieved a great success. Unfortunately, I'm concerned that there will be those out there who look at the XO and instead focus on its current limitations. This should not be a treated as a totally "ready for primetime" system but instead a system that is, and probably will remain, a work in progress which is the way all good open-source projects should be.

For those of you interested, please also note that there is a vast new growth in XO support being driven by those in the development community and supported further by tinkering new owners. Support will continue to be a big concern for the main organization since they can't possibly support each and every box, but the community is jumping in and I'm finding support to be excellent. If you need help consider posting to the newly unified OLPC Support Forum (I say newly unified since two separate efforts were combined to provide a central resource). Their are also numerous mailing lists and IRC available. The main OLPC wiki remains an essential source of current information.