Unboxing OLPC's XO-1 laptop

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.

[Wayan - OLPC News]

Peter,

Congrats on getting your XO laptop! As a lucky G1G1, I invite you to check out the OLPC News Forum where you can share your tricks and tips and join an XO user group too. http://www.olpcnews.com/forum

[jklaus99]

I had a similar and even more extreme 'left on the doorstep' experience. Mine arrived the day after I left to visit the family (oddly enough in San Jose). But I live in Madison, WI which, in the 8 days my xo sat by my door 3-4 hours of freezing rain and about a foot of snow in my driveway when I returned. Luckily, there was a protective overhang overthe xo. Still, the box was distorted from the moisture and actually frozen to the concrete! After allowing two hours to warmup I took it out of its warped box, dried it off and fired it up. No problem!

It should be noted that the documntion provided did say that it was intentionally limited, to reduce waste. In fact I found the xo to be very intuitive and was able tofind most features without the online docs.

I think the dual mode display was an outstanding and innovative design choice. It provides color but still allows the xo to be used in bright sunlight where children will (ideally) spend a lot of thier time. Show the xo's size, weight,and display capabilities to a field researcher in the natural sciences (or the young, developing researcher) and I think they would bevery pleased indeed. One other nice feature of the display that was not mentioned is that it can be rotated. This allows the display to fold into place with the screen facing out, forming a 'tablet' style reader with game keys providing support for navigation. The only drawback here is that there is no way to control the cursor in 'tablet mode' (should be added).

I think the keyboard works well. It is intended for small hands after all. Typing with adulthands is a bit strained but it is the hand, notthe device that isthe problem I think. One issue I do see is that the space key requiresa bit more force that the other keys. Just a tweak needed there but I think matching touch sensitivity would smooth typing effort. I does work, i'm typing this comment on my xo! :)

I agree the touch pad is inconsistent and the use of hot corners with dedicated navigation keys may be confusing.

Overall, VERY impressive. the last time I was this excited over a new computer was in 1979 when I got my apple2. I can imagine all the kids out there finding the terminal interface and starting to poke around in linux. Oh, to be young! :) I can't wait to get the emulator running and develop my first 'activity'. Hmmmm.... field research eh??? :)

[bmunch]

Yves Behar, the designer of the laptop discusses what considerations went into making the OLPC here: http://www.scribemedia.org/2007/12/20/olpc/

[woodland2002]

Thank you so much for your test. I am so disappointed by the disingenuous comments by Negroponte. At the end of November 2007, he was saying on C-SPAN program that XO-laptop has Hand-crank power generator (this is AFTER G1G1 program started). So I joined 1G1G program. Now it turned out that XO-laptop does NOT have the power generator. It "may" have hand crank in the future. I watched the program again, but Negroponte never said the word "future". I joined at the end of November, but they told me that it may arrive Jan 15 or later. I will just sell it on ebay and buy Asus eeePC, and never trust OLPC again.

[woodland2002]

I forgot to mention this. The CSPAN program I was talking about was:
"Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child, Founder and Chairman
from C-SPAN - Q and A on November 27, 2007"
You can watch it at http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=202050-1

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

In fairness, it seems clear to me from watching the video that Negroponte was describing an external crank. He was holding the laptop, after all, and didn't indicate the presence of a crank on the system.

But I agree that he could have been clearer in what he said, and that the OLPC website could be much more forthcoming with the exact specifications of the machine.

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[Peterxy]

I was very excited when I received my XO. When it came out of the box, my first impression was, ?Wow this is CUTE. This has to be a great toy.? (The next thought was ?How the hell do you open it???)

Once I started out playing and working with the XO, which I did for about two weeks, I felt a little less in love with it. First of all was the keyboard. I was very happy when I found that a USB keyboard worked fine. Folks, get real. The tiny keyboard is an impediment to poor kids that grow up and still need their computer. Exploitive adults will just plug in a cheap keyboard and mouse. This is a really stupid ?feature? that was not thought through. It just makes the computer less useful top the target market and less marketable to governments, NGOs etc. This has to be fixed.

Software evaulation: 1) It needs a file system. If kids write stuff etc. they need to file what they write in folders. The current version is simply incomplete. By the way, the Journal is not permanent. Items get deleted as new ones are created. It is OK that the storage needs to be a memory stick, but there has to be a non-Linux way to access the file structure. I think they just didn?t have time to get this done. This is critical.

2) Re didn?t get done: cut and paste don?t work yet! That makes a lot of things, especially Linux software installs really hard. This also MUST get fixed fast.

3) Browse is not a complete browser, no bookmarks etc. No cut and paste. Please finish it.

4) No Flash. Without Flash, Browse was really useless, no Youtube, no Flickr slide shows etc. If you insist on no Flash initially, at least make it possible to load Flash by clicking on a link (make the installation .xo). Without cut and paste it was really bad. I kept making command line typos. Why make this so ridiculously hard? What about the intended audience, who probably won?t have broadband Internet access? Get real.

5) Opera: This was ALMOST a solution, but there are font size problems etc. that are noted on the Wiki page. The worst was the tiny mouse arrow in Opera.

6) No email application: A VERY simple application is needed. Access to G-Mail does not meet the need. This needs to be developed.

And NOW to my CRIPPLING hardware problems. First, 10 days after the XO, arrived, it just stopped working. I took out the battery cleaned the contacts and reinstalled it a couple of times. It then started working again. Is there a problem here??

REALLY CRIPPLING: Shortly after I installed Opera (15 minutes or so later), input from the keyboard went crazy. At first I thought it was just in Opera, but then it turned out to be general. When I typed either the wrong characters were entered or later nothing happened. I could not even try to fix THAT, so I called for an RMA.

I was on the phone waiting for over an hour. There must be a lot of other machines being returned for repairs. Is it the same problem I had? I haven?t seen that mentioned by anyone else yet, but ?

This is a computer that needs to be reliable under rough circumstance. if these computers are shoddily made, the project is doomed.

Final thoughts: despite all this it is hard not to like, even love, the XO, but really it is a project, not a product. The product needs to be finished, or it ill turn off its potential audience. (I hope a certain Prof. Negroponte is listening.)

After finishing the product, I would also make it available for first-world kids. The price of the product could be, say, $250, $200 for the computer plus a $50 donation to the project. It is really adorable and people will buy it and get hooked on the project. This is just a variant on G1G1, and it would work.

Despite my disappointments, I am still guardedly enthusiastic about the project, but there is a lot of work that is needed before it can succeed.