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The One Laptop per Child initiative's "Give One, Get One" scheme is to come to Europe.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of OLPC, told ZDNet UK in an e-mail interview Wednesday that version two of "Give One, Get One" (G1G1) would enable European users to participate in the scheme.

"(The) popularity of G1G1 expanded in the USA," wrote Negroponte. "We are taking G1G1 global this time."

Under the G1G1 scheme, people will be able to purchase an XO laptop, the price of which will also buy and send an XO to a child in a developing country. The scheme ran last year in the U.S. and is due to restart there on November 17. People in the U.S. will be able to purchase the laptops for $399 and donate through Amazon.com.

No official details were available at the time of writing about U.K. cost, availability, or when the scheme will launch in Europe.

Negroponte wrote that technical support for users is still being worked out and that Amazon will not be selling a dual-boot version that runs both Windows and OLPC's open-source Sugar operating system.

"We will not sell the dual-boot," wrote Negroponte. "Microsoft is making that version for the developing world only."

The next stage of the OLPC project will depend on the popularity of the G1G1 scheme, the results of which are due at the end of December, wrote Negroponte. If the results are good, the project will expand to distribute the laptops among displaced people, conflict regions and the 50 poorest countries.

After that, OLPC will "make the laptop available to the rest of the world through a partnership of some sort," wrote Negroponte.

Negroponte added that he believed the price of an OLPC laptop could drop to $75 by 2011, "as long as the dollar does not sink."

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

The chairman and founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative said in an interview Tuesday that the XO laptop may switch from using Linux to eventually running Windows XP, according to several reports.

Windows XP could soon be available on the XO.

(Credit: OLPC)

In an interview with the Associated Press following the departure of the OLPC project's president, Nicholas Negroponte said the open-source Sugar software, developed expressly for the XO, could run on top of XP. Negroponte cited weaknesses in the XO's current open-source operating system (right now the XO can't support the latest versions of Flash animation) as well as the Linux community itself (for being too "fundamentalist") as the reasons for a possible future shift.

He said the laptop's open-source software had actually scared away potential adopters.

An XP-only version of the XO could come soon enough. In December Microsoft said it would begin running limited tests in January to see if the operating system would be a good fit for the low-cost device. At the time, Microsoft said it could have XP running on the XO by the second half of the year.

In the hardware world, the first-mover strategy only works if you get it right.

For example, let's consider Palm's Foleo. Introduced last May at the D: All Thing Digital conference, the Foleo was supposed to be a $499 lightweight "mobile companion" with a full-size keyboard. Sure, it looked like a 10-inch laptop, but it was woefully underpowered, and it was designed to only work with Palm's Treo smartphones at first: modifications would have to have been made to support other phones.

Faced with mounting criticism, Palm made the correct decision in September to postpone the Foleo project and focus on more pressing priorities. But late last year, something interesting began to happen. After watching the early interest in a different design, Asus' Eee PC, the PC industry began taking another look at the idea of low-cost lightweight laptops that couldn't handle Crysis but could get you up and running on the Internet.

Palm's Foleo is not what designers of the latest subnotebooks have in mind.

(Credit: Palm)

My colleague Erica Ogg, a smart and thoughtful person despite her baffling support for the Los Angeles Dodgers, thinks that Palm and Hawkins deserve more credit for coming up with this concept. Earlier today, she wrote, "but the Eee wasn't the first to employ the broader concept of a mobile Web device that looked like a notebook PC, but was meant to function more as a secondary device. That was the idea brought to us by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins with the Foleo."

I'm not sure I could disagree more. Just for a moment, I'll leave aside the fact that Asus announced the Eee PC just days after Hawkins introduced his "best idea ever," meaning company executives probably didn't throw together a blueprint for the Eee PC on the plane ride back from Carlsbad, Calif., to Taiwan.

This idea has been around for ages. Gateway had one. Toshiba had one. Sony had one. The problem with all of those designs was that they were too expensive, too underpowered, too clunky, or all three. Most were released well before wireless networking became ubiquitious, as well.

These days, with the price of processing power and storage at an all-time low, it stands to reason that people would be interested in compelling devices that won't replace your main home or work PC, but provide a decent experience running today's software.

Unfortunately, that does not in any way describe the Foleo.

Palm designed the Foleo as basically one thing: an adjunct to Treo smartphone owners who wanted a larger keyboard and screen for working through a day's e-mail. It featured a processor designed for 2004-era PDAs, and it was unclear whether it could play video. It came with just 256MBs of storage, nearly four times less capacity than a $49 iPod Shuffle. Toshiba's Libretto 20, a subnotebook introduced 12 years earlier in 1995, used a 270MB hard drive.

Chances are, the Foleo wasn't even as powerful as the smartphones it was designed to work alongside. The only thing it brought to the table that you can't find on an iPhone was a keyboard and a display. And the iPhone is cheaper, with a more powerful processor and boatloads more storage, and it can play movies, television shows, and music with ease.

Now consider the Eee PC (for the record, an even dumber name than the Foleo). It uses a 900MHz processor made by Intel; no powerhouse for sure, but at least it was designed to run PC applications. The base model comes with 2GB of flash memory for storage, and models with 8GB are available.

You're not going to edit home videos on this thing, but you can surf the Web, read and write documents, install third-party software written for Linux clients, and play songs and movies. And priced at $299 to $499, it's also cheaper than the Foleo.

Yes, the Foleo was also a small Linux-based notebook for around $500. That doesn't mean Palm and Hawkins deserve credit for correctly predicting the need for smaller notebook-style computers, because that's not what they designed. The only similarity between the Foleo and the Eee PC is a price tag, the Linux operating system, and a hinge.

Regular readers of this blog might be surprised at the following sentence, but it's true. The person who really deserves credit for the recent miniboom in small low-cost Linux laptops might just be Nick Negroponte.

If you think about it, the XO laptop has spurred far more development than the Foleo.

(Credit: OLPC)

I've had my disagreements with the One Laptop Per Child project and its methods, but those do not extend to the XO laptop itself. It's been a long and winding road, but Negroponte first outlined his idea for a low-cost open-source laptop in January 2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos (click for PDF).

In the months and years that followed, Intel and AMD each scurried to come up with their own proposal for a portable low-cost Linux-based system. The two chipmakers have scored more points slagging each other's ideas than they have in the marketplace, but their efforts working on these types of projects spurred other PC companies to get involved.

And the XO laptop has actually received some interest from regular folks in developed countries intrigued by the interface and design of the laptop. The XO is likewise not a very powerful system, but at least it can do more than read e-mail and browse the Web.

Let's give Palm and Jeff Hawkins credit for a lot of things--perhaps most importantly, the notion of truly mobile computing itself. But if the race to develop The Next Mobile Computer really centers around the Eee PC and its offspring, it won't be because of the Foleo.

Lesson learned: Just because something can run two operating systems doesn't mean it's a "dual-boot" system.

Microsoft put the kibosh on talk of a dual-boot XO laptop after OLPC chairman and founder Nick Negroponte told IDG News Service Wednesday that the two organizations are working on such a project. "While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop," a Microsoft representative said in a statement Thursday.

While that might appear to be a flat-out denial, in a way, it depends on what your definition of "dual-boot" is, to paraphrase Slick Willie.

The OLPC and Microsoft are working on an XO laptop that would ship with the Linux operating environment designed by the OLPC, but that could "securely reflash" over to a Windows environment stored on an SD card and back, according to Walter Bender of the OLPC. If Negroponte wasn't misquoted calling it a "dual-boot system," then he misspoke, Bender said, also noting he wasn't there during the interview in question.

So what does that mean? That plan wouldn't seem to result in a dual-boot system in the strictest sense, using Apple's Boot Camp technology as the example. But Microsoft's plan for the XO was always to have Windows boot off a 2GB flash memory card, since it needs more than the 1GB of flash memory that ships with the XO in order to run even a stripped-down version of Windows and Office.

While that's a little different from a "dual-boot system," it is a method that will allow Linux and Windows to run the same laptop, which is perhaps where Negroponte's confusion began.

However, Microsoft hinted that in the future, Negroponte might not be the best spokesman for anything about the XO related to the software giant. When it comes to the progress of the Windows-based XO, "Microsoft recommends contacting the company directly for any further updates," it said in a statement.

Novatium Solutions, which has come up with a thin-client computer for emerging markets, has landed an investment from New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

The company has mostly installed its computers around Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India. The systems work on the thin-client model. Most of the actual computing and the Internet connection goes through a central server. Users then tap into the server through desktop units.

With thin clients, updates and security patches are easier to manage, according to Rajesh Jain, one of Novatium's founders. Energy can also be conserved. In a novel twist, Novatium's clients use a digital signal processor rather than a standard processor. NEA did not state how much it has invested in the company.

Jain, who sold his IndiaWorld portal in 2000 for $115 million, is one of India's better known technology execs. After selling IndiaWorld, he turned his attention to expanding the computer base in India. He also writes a popular blog. (Interestingly, another founder is Ray Stata, chairman of DSP maker Analog Devices.)

Novatium's computer will play in the same market as devices such as the Intel Classmate PC and the XO from the One Laptop Per Child organization created by Nicholas Negroponte. Some of these devices will be sold to schools, while others will likely be bought by Internet cafe owners, who will then recover their investment by selling time on their computers. Many phone booths in India are actually owned by individual entrepreneurs.

Even though Negroponte popularized the "$100 computer" name, no one is actually hitting that number. The XO will cost about $188 after a series of price hikes. Taiwan's Asustek is working on a $200 computer based around Intel's designs.

Novatium says that its machine costs about 500 rupees a month, including Internet connectivity, software and hardware. That's about $12.44.

Novatium has also experimented with ways of using old monitors and TVs to cut the price further. In a 2005 interview, Jain said that he could get the total price down to around $120 with a used monitor.

Chennai is something of a center for cheap computing devices. Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the Indian Institute of Technology of Chennai has developed a $1,000 automatic teller machine that can also serve as an Internet kiosk for villages.

Thursday's briefing by Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop Per Child initiative seems to have meant different things to different folks.

The Associated Press led with the rising price of the laptop, designed for school-age tots in developing nations ("'$100 laptop' to cost $175"), while the Reuters news agency focused on the potential for use closer to home ("U.S. schools may join inexpensive laptop project"). And The Boston Globe, for which the just-across-the-Charles-River OLPC is in part a local business story, got caught up with the laptop's sense of fun, style and mission ("It's cute, green--and may change world").

The OLPC group says software efforts remain focused on the Linux operating system, even as some of the news reports suggested a looming role for Windows. And the price, backers say, will start to drop once high-volume manufacture and distribution are a reality.

For now, the system once touted as the "$100 laptop" remains very much a work in progress, with a little something for everybody--including schoolchildren in Nigeria who are already trying out the laptops.

Blog community response:

"Got to say, still excited about this project. Last time I held a computer class in the DR, a massive power surge nearly killed me when the computer in question was powered up... These little things should be able to take the abuse, and the unstable power grids of many of these developing countries. Still cannot wait until a consumer model is released, so I can prepair a few classes on them for next time I go down."
--Slashdot user Upaut

"Microsoft clearly doesn't want to see millions of OLPC machines running Linux and has now offered an alternative."
--Hardware 2.0

"The realities of manufacturing and designing mass market products has set in, but the result is still pretty good, don't you think? I saw a prototype a few weeks ago, and they ditched the crank now too. Hopefully they keep the wireless mesh."
--GigaOm

"Negroponte does not try to compete on the market, he pushes his laptops through governments and schools on powerless students."
--TechNewLogy

As if the kids in developing nations didn't have to work hard enough to survive, they now have to keep up with all the name changes of the so-called $100 laptop.

MIT's Nicholas Negroponte is now calling the device the "XO," according to Fortune. For a while, it was called the 2B1 (the name that still appears on its official Web site) and before that it was the $100 laptop from the One Laptop Per Child organization.

The name, of course, isn't the only thing that's changed--it will probably cost $130 initially and only get toward $100 in 2008. The laptop is targeted at emerging markets where a few computers can supplement the school curriculum for kids or let individuals create businesses. The results of putting PCs in villages are always interesting: In Mali, radio stations have set up e-mail services that let villagers send messages to each other and communicate quickly. There aren't a lot of phones.

Despite all the publicity, the XO is only one of several computers designed for people in the emerging world. It also seems to be the one with the most potential flaws. It has no hard drive, for one thing, and needs to be subsidized by governments. However, when you start it up, it does play a few bars from a U2 song.