It’s real. The One Laptop Per Child foundation has skipped right past the much-debated, long-delayed dual-display second-gen laptop and is apparently ready to deliver the tablet.
And at first glance, it’s amazing. 8-inch display on what looks like an original OLPC XO-1 with the keyboard half ripped off, able to run either Sugar or (!!) Android. Bear in mind that the original XO-1 did have a touchable screen, so the idea of running Sugar on a tablet isn’t utterly insane, but a bare-bones install of Android might be a better idea if you want to keep the “open source” idea and still run the kind of things you’d want in a first world non-education setting.
Which I do, believe me. At $100 – and they think the production cost may come in even lower – this is as bare bones as you can get, but it’s a ruggedized 8-inch tablet that you could take out in the woods and recharge with a hand crank (literally), or take on a trip and not sweat it if you drop it into the Thames. It’s probably too big to go in a coat pocket, but it’s proof of concept that you can build a tablet for a hundred bucks that brings a value proposition to the table.
Gizmodo aptly points out that the XO-1 was basically the existence proof of the netbook, which Asus brought to market and everyone else jumped on. The XO-3 may be the existence proof of the cheap-and-cheerful Android tablet, quite possibly the first way ever to get computing into a household for under a hundred bucks.
All I can say is – the day they announce a Give One Get One for these things, the credit card is shooting out of the wallet all by itself.