One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, has announced a brand new concept laptop/tablet that it believes it can have be ready for 2010. The concept is glorious and the shots provided exciting enough to publish in their entirety.
Instead of just making a cheap, basic machine that could tough it out in its target third-world market, Nicholas Negroponte’s supposedly $100 laptop instead chose to both patronize and confuse with an over-simplified interface. At the same time, as the price rose and dates slipped by, the Rise of the Atom put cheap netbooks within reach of anyone with a few hundred bucks.
The new hardware (read: vaporware) will come in the familiar green and white livery, only this time it is a tablet (surprise, right?). The XO 3.0 will be showing its 800Mhz, 8.5-by-11-inch face in 2010, when hopefully the technology will exist to build what is essentially a giant iPod Touch for just $75.
But making an impossibly cheap entertainment device for developing countries (for what else is a tablet but a handheld media-center? Certainly not a functional computer or Microsoft’s earlier tablet PC efforts would have been successful) is not the only mission of the OLPC group. Negroponte told Engadget that there will be an OLPC 1.5 appearing in January, a $200 update to the current hardware, and an OLPC 1.75 in 2011, which will make good on the dual-screen promise first teased in May this year.
Sources:
1. Wired
2. TechRadar
3. OLPC
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