On Saturday, my 3.5 year old daughter got her first laptop. It arrived by UPS, sent by her Zadie (grandfather). It’s a small little laptop that is part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project at www.Laptop.org.
It’s still not a final verison of the product that will be released around the world, but it’s still a very impressive piece of technology. It uses 5% of the power consumption my PC laptop uses, and has a screen that rotates around 360 degrees. It can be used in direct sunlight, and has a video camera and microphone for recording audio, photos and video. It can connect to the web, and has some basic stripped down programs like word processing, painting and other simple games.
Right now her favorite is the number guessing game. It comes loaded to have someone guess a number between 1-100, but I’ve changed it so that it’s using numbers between 1-10. If the number you choose is too high or too low, it tells you so that you can continue guessing.
Pretty cool for a $188 machine that runs Linux and a new display layer called Sugar. It still has a few bugs, but it’s a pretty impressive little laptop. Crazy stuff…