Speeds and Feeds

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation on Blip.tv or download the PowerPoint slides direct from O'Reilly.

The talk is well worth watching, but it's flawed in many respects. Jepsen still has the over-the-top attitude displayed all too commonly by participants in the OLPC initiative, who often act as if they had actually saved the world instead of merely doing something good for it.

She started out with a series of very squishy claims that overstated the importance of her work, including references to the "digital divide" (a term of propaganda) and statements about how "97 percent of adolescents live in the developing world." Both claims rely on entirely arbitrary definitions.

Jepsen's 97 percent figure in particular assumes that all populations outside "Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan" are part of the developing world, but of course that isn't true. If I lived in Hong Kong, Riyadh, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, or various other places, I would probably resent Jepsen's implication.

Jepsen singled out power consumption as the most critical requirement for success in laptops for the developing world, but I think an equally strong case can be made for cost, ruggedness, or ease of use. All of these elements must be in place, or the machines aren't worth the effort of deploying them...as many countries approached by OLPC have decided over the last few years.

Jepsen also said that "Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Craig Barrett, and Michael Dell said it was impossible" for the OLPC project to deliver on its early promises.

I don't know that they did, and she didn't exactly cite references. But after all, it was impossible. And, in fact, OLPC did not deliver what it promised: a $100 laptop. It still hasn't done that and shows no sign of doing so anytime soon.

But most of my problems with Jepsen's presentation stem from her claims about technical matters.

For example, she said that the OLPC XO-1 laptop--for which she was the lead designer--is a "1 watt laptop," "more than 10 times lower (power) than the next laptop up."

But the XO-1 certainly is not a 1 watt laptop; on an apples-to-apples basis, it's more like a 4 watt laptop, and the best traditional PC laptops consume only about 50 percent more power--in spite of larger screens, faster processors, and a complete array of external interfaces. The Thinkpad X series (originally from IBM, now from Lenovo) has included several models down in this power range, according to my own laboratory testing.

Jepsen wanted her audience to believe that the key breakthrough in the XO-1 design was the screen, but the fact is that low-resolution, low-quality, low-power displays have been widely available for years. They aren't used in PCs because they don't meet the expectations of PC users. And frankly, the display in the XO-1 wouldn't meet most PC users' expectations either.

Speaking about the component consuming the most power in PC laptops, Jepsen said this: "It's the screen, not the CPU, not the motherboard." But this is not true in most laptops, especially in the size range of the OLPC XO-1, or in most usage conditions. A 12-inch LCD may consume only 2 watts to 3 watts, usually less than the motherboard in the same system. While an x86 laptop processor may consume less than a watt when idle, it will generally consume over 10 watts when busy.

The purpose of Jepsen's remarks was to create the impression that the display has become more important than any other component in a laptop computer, but I don't think that conclusion is supported by the facts.

Why would she want people to believe the display is so important? As she said in the presentation, she's still working to raise funding for her display start-up, Pixel Qi.

It's traditional for CEOs to overstate the significance of their start-ups, but that doesn't mean they ought to get away with twisting facts in the process.

And it's just not necessary, either. As critical as I've been about Jepsen's hyperbole here, I still think that the work Pixel Qi is doing will be valuable to the industry. Pixel Qi does seem to have a very narrow focus, but I certainly appreciate the fact that start-ups have to start somewhere.

From what I can see on the company's site, Pixel Qi's first product will be a 10-inch LCD that appears to bridge the gap between the E Ink display used in Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle e-book readers and the LCDs commonly used in PCs and TVs. With both a high-quality reflective monochrome e-book mode and a "fully saturated color" mode, such a display could be a good choice for many small notebook and tablets. In her speech, Jepsen said the company is also working on a low-power (under 10 watts) HDTV screen, which is also likely to be popular.

But more generally, I believe there's still room for plenty of improvement in CPUs, chipsets, and other laptop components, not just displays. I see no reason we can't eventually get $100 laptops, but it'll take improvements in all these areas to get there.

I learned about the new Give One, Get One program of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation the same way most people will--from a TV commercial sponsored by Amazon.com, which is handling order fulfillment for the new program through this page on Amazon's Web site.

Like last year's program, which I wrote about here before and after I bought one myself, the deal is simple: you buy two laptops for $399, and you get one. The other goes to a deserving student somewhere in the developing world. (This is why I sometimes call it the Buy 2, Get 1 program, or B2G1.)

The XO-1 laptop from the OLPC Foundation

(Credit: OLPC Foundation)

The laptops themselves are the same XO-1 models offered last year, not based on the XO-2 prototypes I wrote about here last May. I wrote about my XO-1 in some detail when it arrived, but since I never really found any good reason to use it regularly, I never got around to writing a full review.

But there is something new: version 8.2.0 of the XO software, which works just fine on last year's hardware. I installed this on my own machine last week so I could offer some personal comments here, and the short summary is, it's a significant improvement.

The new software is more reliable, more capable, and better organized. I hope to find time to give a better review of 8.2.0 here; it has some nice features that could reasonably be adopted in more mainstream Linux distributions.

With Amazon's support--especially the TV commercial, which I've seen several times during major network broadcasts, including, perhaps oddly, football games--the new G1G1 program is likely to achieve better results than last year's effort, which resulted in the sale of about 167,000 units.

Even with the new software, the XO-1 is really just a proof of concept showing that laptops can be used in an educational context. Educating young children, however--whether in the U.S. or Rwanda--isn't about learning to use a laptop but rather about learning language, math, history, and other more fundamental facts and skills. Certainly, a laptop can be used to teach these things--but that requires a lot of software that simply hasn't been written yet.

Because the OLPC project runs mostly on volunteer labor, the best way to get that software is to get a lot of systems out there, and Amazon's sponsorship of this year's G1G1 program could do more to achieve that goal than all previous efforts put together. We'll see.

I just saw an interesting piece over on the EE Times website (here) written by David Carey, president of Portelligent, an analyst firm well-known for doing teardowns of popular electronic products.

The XO-1 laptop from the OLPC Foundation

(Credit: OLPC Foundation)

Here are some of the key points I learned from the article:

According to Portelligent, the LCD is pretty similar to previous transflective LCDs (that is, LCDs that can work from transmitted backlight or reflected ambient light) except for the arrangement of the color subpixels. I've seen nothing particularly remarkable about mine. It offers poor off-axis image quality, as I described in my first look (here), and doesn't even work as well as the transflective LCD on my Sony DSC-T1 digital camera, which displays color in reflective mode. The XO-1's display may be more power-efficient than previous transflective displays, but Carey doesn't report information on that point in this article.

Portelligent did report whole-system power figures, though, seeing 6W to 7W of power consumption during "full-tilt operation," whatever that means, exactly. In my own brief tests I saw power consumption in the range of 4W to 5W when the machine was doing almost nothing. Any machine with such a narrow range of power consumption isn't exhibiting good power management.

Carey's article (and a great illustration, here) goes on to provide some good information about the specific chips found in the unit they took apart. The article is also an advertisement for a full report Portelligent sells with all the details of the teardown, but I don't mind that at all in cases like this where the free article stands on its own.

Last week, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization announced its new XO-2 laptop design, which will likely replace the XO-1 design I've written about before on this blog. There are images of the XO-2 on the OLPC wiki and a video clip from the announcement on Joanna Stern's blog for Laptop magazine.

The OLPC XO-2 laptop features two touch-screen LCDs with a hinge in between.

(Credit: One Laptop Per Child)

The new design uses two touch-screen LCDs flanking a central hinge. This approach allows the unit to be used as a book with facing pages (shown here), as a conventional laptop using a virtual keyboard on the lower display, or as a single system shared by two users.

This is just a conceptual design so far, and the images are computer-generated, but OLPC announced some goals for the redesign-- smaller overall size (about half that of the XO-1), lower weight, 1W power consumption, and a volume price of just $75 in 2010.

These will be difficult goals to achieve, principally because of the doubling of the display area. The XO-1's display is its most expensive component and probably also its heaviest, most fragile, and most power-hungry. As a result, I think the XO-2 design concept is a little too ambitious in a few specific ways.

First, the bezels around the outside of the displays are too narrow. Although modern PC laptops have aesthetically pleasing narrow bezels, this advantage comes at a significant price in the manufacture of the LCDs-- the driver chips have to be mounted on the back of the display glass and connected by flexible circuits. I don't think the XO-2 price target can be achieved without sacrificing the narrow bezel.

Also, LCD touch screens need to be more heavily built than non-touch screens. This is even more true when they're meant to be used by young children, who may use much more force than necessary and may not keep their fingers clean. The XO-2's "keyboard" screen had better be almost bulletproof... and that means more size and weight.

The thin, light, small-outline enclosure also impairs ruggedness. A system intended for use by young children in austere conditions needs to be more heavily built. For example, thin case halves mean thin hinges. Though thin hinges can be strong enough when made with heavy or expensive materials, that solution conflicts with the XO-2's weight and price targets.

The 1W power-consumption target will be especially difficult to hit. The XO-1's LCD consumes about that much power all by itself, and at least twice that with the backlight on. If the OLPC folks mean that the 1W figure is for outdoor e-book reading (CPU idle, backlight off, no network activity), they ought to say that. Giving that figure along with images of brightly backlit displays is misleading at best. (And the color in the simulated images is much better than that available from the XO-1's relatively washed-out display.)

Also, the OLPC people talk about Windows compatibility-- Windows XP, at least-- and it's unlikely there will be any Windows XP-compatible hardware platform capable of achieving a 1W average power consumption figure in 2010... never mind the 1/4W or less that would be available to the processor and chipset with two LCDs running (even without the backlight).

The XO-2 could be based on some cellphone-like chipset, but that would sacrifice Windows XP compatibility. And if there is an XP-capable low-power chipset on the market by 2010, it's likely that it will also be used in more traditional laptops and mobile Internet devices. Similarly, the technology behind the XO-1's LCD is likely to be more widely used in the next few years. In other words, the XO-2 isn't likely to gain any meaningful advantage in this respect over competing platforms.

To me, none of this bodes well for the OLPC initiative in spite of the publicity it has received from these announcements. The organization still seems committed to a strategy of over-promising and under-delivering... not exactly a path to success.

OLPC users meeting at Baycon

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Incidentally, over Memorial Day weekend, I met with several XO-1 users at Baycon, an annual science-fiction convention here in Silicon Valley. This was the largest collection of OLPC users I've ever seen in person. The crowd was a mix of individual users, OLPC developers, and people interested in getting an XO-1 of their own.

OLPC developer Ed Cherlin (shown here on the right in the blue and white-striped shirt) recapped the announcements from last week, described new XO-1 software under development, and answered questions. (I asked him why browser bookmarks disappear after a reboot-- he said this was by design, but that previously visited URLs can be found in the Journal. Sure enough, that works.)

The meeting was also a recap of the shortcomings I've seen in the XO-1. Several of the systems people brought to the meeting had dead batteries because of previous use that day, networking activity while the machines were apparently in standby, or because they hadn't shut down properly. Of the eight or so working machines present, no more than three or four were able to get networked together, probably because of incompatible software versions. Nobody was satisfied with the keyboards. Of course, these were all older users with hands larger than the children for whom these systems were designed, but if OLPC can't get adults interested, there'll never be enough software to meet these kids' needs.

Nevertheless, it was a fun and informative get-together, and it probably persuaded some of the non-owners in the group to get XO-1s of their own when the Give One, Get One program starts up again in August or September of this year.

I like the Belkin company. I remember when Belkin was basically nothing but a cable company, and by that, I mean a company that makes electrical and optical cables. They made good cables, and still do.

The Belkin F6C550-AVR UPS.

(Credit: Belkin International)

But in recent years they have expanded into a wide variety of consumer products. I've always assumed Belkin's expansion was driven, at least in part, by the success of Monster Cable, which has made a lot of money selling expensive cables that (in my opinion, at least) are not always worth the price.

I imagine Belkin's engineering-oriented management deciding that selling well-engineered cables at a reasonable price would provide effective competition for Monster's marketing-focused strategy. I have no idea whether it went that way or not, but at least it's a sensible theory.

I sometimes wonder sometimes if Belkin isn't expanding too quickly. The company seems to be introducing new product lines faster than some companies introduce new products. That can lead to problems with product quality, customer support, and other critical business functions.

I've bought quite a few Belkin gizmos over the last several months, including the TuneTalk Stereo that I reviewed here back in September. (And also see this update to that review.) The TuneTalk Stereo was incorrectly marketed as compatible with the newly-released iPod classic, and although Belkin advised me that an upcoming iPod update would likely restore compatibility with the classic, my TuneTalk Stereo still isn't fully functional. Maybe the current models work fine; I don't know.

But I've continued to buy Belkin products, including several audio and video cables and a USB hub that I've had no problems with.

Unfortunately, just this week I've bought two Belkin products that didn't live up to my expectations. One was a fairly trivial little item, the F9H600-03 Surgemaster power strip. I needed a power strip so I could plug in some "wall wart" power supplies that wouldn't fit on the back of a UPS, and this product was the cheapest power strip with surge suppression available at my local Home Depot.

Since they were only about $8 each, I bought two of them; I figured I'd find a use for the other at some point. But when I plugged in the first one, it immediately made a loud snapping sound inside and released a puff of vile-smelling smoke. I was so eager to get it out of the house that I immediately wrapped it up in the Home Depot bag and took it out to the trash. I simply wasn't going to give it the chance to stink up my car in order to return it.

The other power strip worked fine, and I doubt it'll ever go bad. It's hooked up to an outlet on the year-old APC Smart-UPS that services my Power Mac G5, and three little power bricks are plugged into it in turn.

For many years, I've bought all of my UPSs from APC; I've always been happy with that brand. But when I went UPS shopping for one to put in my bedroom to protect the XO-1 from the One Laptop Per Child organization that has taken up residence on my nightstand, I bought a Belkin instead.

At least at my local Fry's on that day, the Belkin F6C550-AVR was a better deal than any of the APC UPSs in stock. The Belkin product was, by far, the cheapest model that offered an alarm disable function. APC's cheaper models don't have that feature, but if I'm going to be sleeping next to a UPS during an extended power outage, I need to be able to shut off the alarm.

Anyway, I got the Belkin model home and hooked it up to my XO-1, my alarm clock, the charger for my Palm Treo, and a 20W flourescent lamp.

After it had been plugged in for a few hours, I tested it by unplugging it from the wall. And wouldn't you know it, the flourescent lamp-- a cheap model without a starter or ballast, admittedly-- shut off for a second then turned itself back on. Subsequent testing produced the same result. That's clear evidence that the switchover time from AC power to the internal battery isn't as short as it ought to be. I tested one of my APC UPSs with the same lamp, and the lamp never flickered.

I didn't return this product either, since it meets my simple needs in this application. The XO-1 won't notice a brief power interruption since it has its own battery, but I wouldn't use the F6C550-AVR to protect a desktop computer.

Three incidents, especially when they involve unrelated problems in different products over the space of five months, don't really establish a trend. But I have to admit I'm going to be a little less likely to buy Belkin products going forward.

Except the cables. I still like Belkin cables.

I missed this little bit of news at the time, but it's worth passing along here, if only for completeness.

In a brief interview published on New Year's Eve by Laptop magazine, One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte said total XO-1 laptop shipments during the organization's "Give One, Get One" promotion were expected to be between 150,000 and 170,000 units.

The XO laptop from the OLPC Foundation

(Credit: OLPC Foundation)

A few days later, The New York Times reported that OLPC announced a more precise figure: 167,000 laptops. (Unfortunately, I can't locate the OLPC announcement itself; it isn't on the official OLPC site site.)

Either way, the organization also received additional orders during the promotion from Birmingham, Ala. (15,000 laptops) and others. Wikipedia's OLPC entry includes a table accounting for 602,000 units.

These aren't bad numbers for a new machine that isn't even really finished. The XO-1's software isn't yet considered stable or feature-complete. Battery life doesn't yet measure up to OLPC's early promises, as I verified with my own G1G1 machine. There's very little support available for the machine, and the 30-day warranty is good only for immediately obvious problems.

So although the approximately 83,500 orders received during the G1G1 program wouldn't be considered a great success in a commercial context, I think it reflects a pretty reasonable start to what needs to be a long-term effort.

I'm a little late to the party with this unboxing of my new OLPC XO-1 laptop, but the machine arrived while I was out of town visiting my family for Christmas. In fact, there's a story there.

Before I left, I started hearing that people were receiving their XO-1's, and I realized that if mine didn't show up before I left, it would almost certainly arrive while I was gone. The OLPC people sent out no shipment notifications and didn't reply to several emails, so I had no way to delay the shipment or contact the carrier.

I left a note on my front doorstep: "PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE PACKAGES HERE. HOLD FOR PICKUP. THANKS."

But on Dec. 21, a FedEx delivery person left the XO-1 box right next to the note, and they were both still there six days later when I got home. All that time, the package was in clear view of the street. Never mind New York-- I love Cupertino.

If you get an XO-1, don't throw away the box! You'll need it for the free year of Internet access through T-Mobile WiFi hot spots. The box has the reference number for account activation.

In keeping with the low-cost nature of the XO-1, its packaging is minimal but adequate.

The OLPC XO-1 comes with only a few sheets of basic “Getting Started” documentation.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

The XO-1 comes with no manual, just two sheets of paper: one showing the hardware and software features of the unit plus some warning icons, and one with a thank-you note from OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte.

There's also no warranty booklet. The XO-1 comes with a 30-day limited warranty, but that's it, and it isn't written down anywhere.

I was somewhat surprised-- and pleased-- to see that OLPC provided a toll-free support phone number. As I'll describe in my forthcoming review, that might prove to be an expensive decision; the XO-1 is not yet very well documented, and some aspects of its operation are difficult to understand.

Of course, there's some XO-1 documentation online. Negroponte's letter points buyers to the laptopgiving.com website, which in turn points to the main laptop.org site, and from there a diligent search will reveal more detailed information on the OLPC Wiki.

But many aspects of laptop operation that are familiar to Windows, Mac, or Linux users aren't documented anywhere, as far as I can tell, probably because they aren't even supported. I can't find any way to control power-management features, for example.

Bottom line: the OLPC developers have a lot of work to do. These early systems don't even qualify as beta-test devices; they're just an alpha release, not feature-complete.

But they do work, and I still believe the XO-1's primitive state of development could actually be a positive benefit for bright children, who will be challenged to learn about these machines in ways they'd never have to do with a mainstream laptop PC.

Other than the documentation, the box contains only three items: the XO-1, the battery, and the AC adapter.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

The XO-1's limited hardware budget isn't wasted on unnecessary doo-dads. It arrives with the bare minimum of accessories: a battery and an AC adapter.

The battery is rated at 6.5V, 3.1AH (20.15 watt-hours); the AC adapter is rated at 12V, 1.42A (17.04W).

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Both of these items are in keeping with the low-power design of the XO-1. Most laptops today come with larger batteries, often in the 50 watt-hour range; the XO-1's battery provides only 40% as much capacity. The AC adapters for full-size notebook PCs usually provide over 65W of power; this one is about a quarter as powerful.

But these are advantages, not disadvantages. A low-power laptop is like a lightweight car. A lighter car can use a smaller engine, brakes, and suspension without compromising performance. If the car gets heavier, the other components have to bulk up too. Similarly, reducing a laptop's power consumption saves weight in the machine itself and in its battery and power adapter.

The XO-1's battery compartment is well integrated into the bottom of the unit.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

You can see here that the whole surface of the XO-1's hard plastic case is covered by a pattern of nubbly dots that make it easier to grip without making it any more difficult to clean-- a wise decision by the developers. There's also a bit of whimsy around the handle section, where the openings are ringed by little "X" shapes that form the XO-1 logo.

There are four soft narrow feet at the corners of the unit.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Since the hard plastic would still be too slippery on a desk, the XO-1 has molded-in feet made of some non-skid rubbery material. They aren't very tall; since the XO-1 consumes so little power, there's no need to create airspace under the case.

Each XO-1 gets a logo with a distinctive color combination.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

My XO-1 came with a nice blue/green logo color combination. I don't know how many combinations there are, but I gather it's a large number, reducing the odds that two students in the same class will have the same colors.

Open, the XO-1 shows its most distinctive feature: the antenna “ears”.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

The XO-1's ears contain 2.4 GHz antennas shared between the WiFi and proprietary mesh networks. They're also the locks that hold the machine closed. They engage with spring-loaded pins so the top will snap closed even if the ears are stowed first.

The left side of the XO-1 provides microphone, headphone, and USB jacks.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

There aren't a lot of I/O options on the XO-1, just the basic requirements. The microphone jack can also be used as a generic analog input; the XO-1 comes with an application that works like a simple oscilloscope. Neat.

(Actually, applications are called "activities" on the XO-1. Sometimes it seems like the developers are thinking too differently.)

Two more USB jacks are located on the right side.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Another clever design feature on the other side of the unit: two USB jacks are positioned at different angles to make it more likely that awkwardly-shaped USB devices can be accommodated.

The XO-1 display is flanked by more buttons including a D-pad and a cluster of buttons like a game controller.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

The XO-1's display is about what I expected. Resolution is good, but colors aren't as vibrant as on traditional LCDs. As I should have predicted, color saturation is related to the ratio of backlighting to ambient light. Outdoors or under a strong indoor light, colors are very washed out even with the backlight cranked up all the way. In sunlight, color disappears entirely, and you might as well turn off the backlight since it doesn't help.

The LCD viewing angle, unfortunately, is very poor. At little as 30 degrees off-axis, contrast begins to drop sharply. Two children sitting side-by-side would have trouble viewing the screen together. For ebook reading, the XO-1's display can't match those of the Sony PRS-505 Reader and the Amazon Kindle.

Not shown here is the Secure Digital (SD-card) slot, which is under the lower edge of the right side of the display unit. The positioning helps protect the slot, but there's no way to get clear access to it, which may limit the range of SD-card peripherals that can be used with the XO-1. I'm not sure this was so clever.

The XO-1 keyboard uses a flimsy rubber membrane over soft springy keyswitches.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

To me, the low point of the XO-1's physical design is the keyboard. The synthetic rubber membrane is very thin and the keyswitches are very soft so there's almost no tactile feedback. Hitting a key feels almost the same as missing one.

Perhaps children's fingertips are sensitive enough to get the feedback they need for good touch-typing. But even if that's true, I fear this keyboard may be too fragile.

The keys are also smaller than necessary, even given the focus on small hands. The keyboard is 15 keys wide, with a double-wide Enter key plus tab, [, and ] keys on the QWERTY row. Although the OLPC developers took a fresh look at pretty much everything else, they slavishly imitated the high key counts of full-size notebooks to their detriment.

Since the XO-1 has multiple modifier keys-- shift, control, alt, fn, "hand", and alt-graph keys-- it would have been better to move more of the punctuation symbols to letter keys, reducing the key count and allowing the keys themselves to be slightly larger, making typing easier.

The keyboard is printed with many international characters, but it isn't as cluttered as it could be. Only one key has four different symbols on it (semicolon, colon, and underlined lower-case a and o characters); most have three, and some have two. G, K, L, Z, X, V, and B are left alone. Oddly, there's a whole extra key just for the "times" and "divide" symbols.

There are also many extra keys for features unique to the XO-1's "Sugar" user interface, which is a good thing. Sugar relies too much on tricks like hot corners and tabs, disappearing borders and drawers, and other features that require a lot of careful cursor motion. Unfortunately, the XO-1's touchpad doesn't operate very smoothly or accurately, at least for me, and there's no apparent way to control its sensitivity or the speed of cursor motion.

Because I was somewhat critical of OLPC in earlier blog posts (here and here) for making strong promises about battery life that weren't supported by the early prototype hardware, the first thing I did with the new machine after charging it for a few hours was to run a couple of simple battery-life benchmark tests.

In the first test, I connected the XO-1 to my home WiFi network (which required falling back from WPA security to the relatively insecure WEP standard), cranked the backlight up to maximum, and opened my favorite webcam page: Ben Lovejoy's auto-refreshing feed for the camera at the public entrance to the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany.

The page didn't load reliably-- sometimes the WiFi connection would drop, provoking Server Not Found errors-- but I kept an eye on it and got it back on track each time it derailed. This wasn't the "heavy use" that OLPC's Walter Bender was describing in his comments on 60 Minutes last May, but at least it was something.

The result? The XO-1 ran for just 45 seconds short of four hours. Not so great.

Well, it's a prototype, and OLPC vice-president Jim Gettys said that "heavy use" could be construed to cover uses as lightweight as reading an ebook outdoors with the backlight off. So I charged the machine overnight and, this morning, from a clean reboot, I started an ebook-reading test with the backlight off. I opened a PDF provided with the XO-1 and pushed the page-down button once every 20 minutes to keep the display from turning off entirely. The machine ran for 4 hours and 59 minutes. (I swear these are the actual numbers.) That's a long way from Bender's promise of "10 to 12 hours... with heavy use."

But still, it's a prototype, and as Gettys explained, there are many opportunities for further power reductions. Similarly, there will undoubtedly be other improvements over time. We'll see.

I had to wake up early to do it, but I was able to order an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (and donate another at the same time).

I was prepared to discover the project's Web site overloaded with visitors--one observer predicted the alloted systems would sell out "in 30 seconds." But I had no problems.

The XO laptop from the OLPC Foundation

(Credit: OLPC Foundation)

I visited Laptopgiving.org promptly at 3 a.m. Monday, saw that the main page had changed to show the start of the "Give One Get One" program, and clicked the "Find out more" button. That took me to a page providing a small amount of additional detail on the program plus a link to place an order.

The ordering link took me to PayPal--so that could explain why the OLPC site wasn't overwhelmed; they're only providing two pages to most visitors. All the e-commerce overhead happens on PayPal's network. I was able to complete the transaction without delays, for a total of $423.95 including shipping.

Back on the OLPC site, I learned that T-Mobile is providing a full year of complimentary access to the company's HotSpot Wi-Fi access points for OLPC buyers. This service applies to any Wi-Fi device, too, not just the XO. T-Mobile values this donation at "more than $350."

That won't mean much to me because I prefer to use my Option GT Max 3.6 Express cellular wireless modem card on the AT&T network when I'm traveling. But for those who would otherwise pay for T-Mobile access, this is a pretty nice offer.

Here's an interesting note in the "Terms and Conditions" page for the purchase:

9. Neither OLPC Foundation nor One Laptop per Child, Inc. has service facilities, a help desk or maintenance personnel in the United States or Canada. Although we believe you will love your XO laptop, you should understand that it is not a commercially available product and, if you want help using it, you will have to seek it from friends, family, and bloggers. One goal of the G1G1 initiative is to create an informal network of XO laptop users in the developed world, who will provide feedback about the utility of the XO laptop as an educational tool for children, participate in the worldwide effort to create open-source educational applications for the XO laptop, and serve as a resource for those in the developing world who seek to optimize the value of the XO laptop as an educational tool. A fee based tech support service will be available to all who desire it. We urge participants in the G1G1 initiative to think of themselves as members of an international educational movement rather than as "customers."

Personally I still feel more like a customer than a member of a movement, but maybe after I've spent some time working with the XO, I'll feel differently.

I have no idea when I'll get the XO I just ordered, nor any idea where the second XO I've paid for will end up. But the project says it'll try to ship my system, at least, before the holidays. When it arrives, I'll write more about it here.

I recently mentioned my plan to get the new Eee PC laptop from Asus in spite of a price hike just before the product was introduced. The Eee PC is basically a low-cost subnotebook intended for developing markets, like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO, which I've also written about here--but unlike the OLPC, the Eee PC will be regularly available in commercial channels.

Well, earlier this week, I found the gizmo for sale over on Newegg.com and placed my order. A mere $458.45 later, including California sales tax and two-day shipping, it was on the way, and it arrived Friday. Here are some initial impressions; I'll post again soon after I've had some time to play with it.

The model offered by Newegg for $399.99 is the high-end configuration in the Eee PC family, at least for the moment. It comes with a 4GB solid-state (flash) disk drive, 512MB of RAM, a 38 watt-hour battery, and a built-in webcam. Cheaper models offer smaller batteries, no webcam, and smaller amounts of flash and RAM for $299 or $349-- but not at NewEgg; they only have the most expensive model. (Also unavailable is a model with an 8GB disk.)

All models share a 900 MHz Intel Celeron M processor (reportedly the ULV model 353) and a 7", 800x480-pixel LCD driven by an Intel integrated-graphics chipset. The Celeron processor isn't very fast, and it consumes more power than I expected-- much more than you really want to see in a tiny machine like this; the bottom of the Eee PC gets quite hot while playing Web videos.

But I found out tonight that the Eee PC could play this one car video that gave my Mac fits every time I tried it. I won't link to the video here because it, or the page it's on, crashed both Safari and Firefox under Mac OS X as well as Internet Explorer and Firefox under Windows Vista running in a Parallels Desktop virtual machine. This was the first time I've ever seen that happen.

But I had the Eee PC within arm's reach, so I hooked it up to my home network, typed in the URL off my Mac's screen, and the video came right up. It was a little choppy, but watchable. Score one for Asus, I guess.

Anyway, please stay tuned for a more detailed review soon. CNET has published a formal review (here), so I'll be focusing on the more esoteric elements of the product.