Comments on: OLPC's Give One, Get One program to be rekindled Nov. 17

Amazon.com is facilitating this year's installment of the One Laptop Per Child donation program.

[shane--2008]

thank you no. i might give both, but i don't want one.

don't get me wrong, it is a great idea and useful for kids in school, but i want a little more out of a laptop than what i can already get out of an iPhone.....

[bakedpatato]

Can the iPhone:
edit documents?(no jailbreak)
watch Flash Videos?
play .ogg/.wmv/.wma/etc files?
Run a browser besides Safari?
Run programs in the background?(jailbreak don't count)
COPY AND PASTE?
Make you feel good that a kid in another country is gaining the skills that will make him relevant in world job market?
Run Linux?
Run Starcraft/CS/heck, Doom?
Run The GIMP(or Photoshop)?
the list goes on, but the most important thing is that you're donating a XO-1 to a kid who would may have otherwise not known what a computer was,and that XO may open up a new world of opportunities for them.

[vikramchauhan10]

Just wondering, why OLPC can not be made available in open market. This will make there manufacturing profitable. Remember that making great device is not enough, marketing is equally and sometime more important. There are many example at present, like marketing and hype of iphone compared to Nokia phones.
I want to purchase OLPC for the my village children, but no option.

[dragonbite]

While it was successful when it first came out, the market has changed BECAUSE of the OLPC.

Many laptop makers are getting into the Netbook market that the OLPC indirectly pioneered.

I don't think they'll find it as successful this time around because for $400 I can get one of a number of Netbooks for myself that is more powerful and more familiar. I like the idea of getting one and passing another to a needy school child but selfishly I will want more out of my machine.

If it were more like a current Netbook, or contained an interface such as Gnome or KDE which I am more familiar with AND included the Grid computing technology then I may be more apt to try one but if it is the same as it was before then it's going to be a hard sell.

[czmyt]

This is a great program if you want to help get one of these computers into the hands of a child in a developing country. I got one through the original give-one, get-one program. It's NOT a very useful PC though. I also have an Asus Eee PC 901 which is about the same size but 100 times more useful since it has Windows XP on it. If you are thinking that this would make a nice little Web surfing notebook, I recommend that you get the run the virtual version of the software on your real PC to check it out. I am not down on Linux because I run it on several of my PCs; it makes a great server operating system. So my recommendation if you want a useful little notebook if to get one of the new netbooks that is available like the Acer One or the Asus Eee PC.