Laptops

Inside The XO Laptop

As the OLPC laptop starts shipping people are becoming more interested

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

24th of July 2007, 09:51 GMT

Adjust text size:

The One Laptop Per Child project is finally hitting mass production with its XO laptop that is both a remarkable piece of engineering and a milestone in the foundation road towards global spread. There are some innovative features inside the XO that make it unique and give it all the qualities needed in a laptop designed to be used in harsh environments and keep it as low cost as possible.

First of all to ensure that the hardware is as robust as possible, the XO has almost no moving parts, no optical or hard disk drives and because of the low power processor used it doesn't even need a cooling fan.

As the XO has no hard disk drive, the storage role is given to a NAND flash memory with anominal capacity of 1GB that can be expanded by using an SD memory card slot underneath the screen or by plugging in peripheral devices through the USB ports. The processor is made by AMD, running at only 433MHz and is designed to be very energy saving and unlike a standard chip, which remains active most of the time, the AMD processor is able to shut itself down, turning on only when it is needed in order to conserve power. The XO has no need for fancy graphics adapters, the AMD processor having a built-in video circuit, thus saving both energy and manufacturing costs. As an operating system, XO uses a Linux variant written by a team of developers from Red Hat that takes only about 130MB of storage space, as opposed to most modern operating systems that measure their needed space in the gigabyte range.

For connectivity, a pair of wi-fi antennas, known as "rabbit ears" are used and they are able to boost the range by two or three times. Under ideal conditions, two XO laptops should be able to communicate even over distances of two kilometers, but in practice, the maximum range will be shorter. One of the most innovative parts of the XO is the display that has two distinct functioning modes. It can be switched between a normal color mode best suited for classroom conditions and an ultra low power mode that is black and white, but can be read even in direct sunlight. The screen size is 7.5 inches supporting the 800x600 resolution and using 1 watt of power in color mode and a 1200x900 resolution and using 0.2 watt in black and white mode.

The keyboard is a sealed type one and it is entirely made of green rubber so it is waterproof and designed to allow a child to easily operate it. The layout of the keyboard is not really a standard one as there is no Caps Lock key for example. In addition to the keyboard, the XO sports a touchpad and a pair of built in speakers. A hard plastic case covers the entire laptop and it is designed to be both dust and waterproof and when closed, the antennas cover the only openings: the data ports. Three USB ports will allow various peripherals to be connected to the XO laptop ranging from a standard sized keyboard or mouse to external storage devices in order to supplement the small internal memory.

TAGS:

OLPC | XO | laptop | mobile | notebook

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: