Bottom line: the XO machine built by the OLPC organization is miniscule; it’s slow; its keyboard is built for tiny hands; the trackpad sucks; and its user interface did not seem quite as intuitive as I had expected. But it’s rugged, it’s got some wonderful UI innovations, and you can’t help but feel like you’re part of a worldwide “movement” that will eventually involve millions of technology-hungry children all over the world.

All of this, I should emphasize, is based on an hour or two of playing around with the machine; it’s quite possible that I may modify my opinions drastically after I’ve had more experience. Interestingly, I expect that I will get more experience over the next week or two, for a somewhat unusual reason: in addition to this first XO machine that I bought for myself (paired with another XO machine that got shipped off to a child somewhere in a third world country), I’ve ordered another XO machine (which involves yet another contribution to some other third-world kid) that I’ll be giving to my five year old grandson. He’s too young to spend much time focusing on the Web browser or the word processor, but I want to have a sufficient understanding of the educational software pre-loaded onto the computer to show him some things that will get him interested.

The reason I mention this is that there’s no way on earth that I would consider using the XO machine for my own work. The screen is too tiny — roughly five inches by seven inches — the keyboard is a tiny chiclet-shaped contraption, and it’s way too slow to support the kind of day-to-day work that I do on my laptop/desktop computer. But hey — it only cost $199, and nobody ever said it was going to be a replacement for a MacBook or a Dell computer. I’m not complaining at all; I just want to remind you that it’s not the sort of thing that a technology-savvy person in an “advanced” country is likely to buy as a “replacement” machine for whatever he or she was already using.

With that caveat, here are some initial impressions after I took the XO machine out of the box and plugged it in:

1. The computer is basically up and running within a minute or two. The only “setup” that it requires is typing in your name. None of the Microsoft nonsense of typing in a 16-digit serial number pasted on the side of the box; none of the usual legalese bullshit of accepting the restrictions of a 20-page license agreement that you can only read a paragraph at a time. No setting of parameters or configuration details or anything else — just type in your name, and you’re up and running.
2. The user manual is two pages long; one page shows you how to open the laptop (which was less obvious than you might think) and where the various ports are located. The second page shows you a picture of the “home view” and “neighborhood view” screens, which are roughly equivalent to the “desktop” view you’re accustomed to seeing on a Mac or Windows machine. More about this in a moment. But in any case, if you need more information (which I eventually did), you can find it on the OLPC website at www.laptop.org/gettingstarted.
3. The tiny screen is not backlit, which means you can use it outdoors. But unlike the Kindle e-book reader which I’ve now been using for a few weeks, the XO machine has a color screen. I have no idea what the screen resolution is, but it seems adequate for normal usage.
4. One of the innovations that I found interesting was the XO’s visual display of all the network connections within range of its rabbit-ears antennae. It distinguishes between “mesh grids,” which are local networks without access to the Internet, and “access points,” which may or may not be locked. It’s intuitively obvious to select which network you’re interested in; but the procedure for actually making the connection was not-so-obvious, and I had to read the directions on the OLPC website to figure it out.
5. Linux 2.6.22 is running under the covers, and it’s not too hard to invoke the command-line shell. The same is true, of course, on a Macintosh — and 99% of Mac users would ask, “Why on earth would you ever want to type Unix commands on your machine?” On the XO, I found it necessary to do so because I needed to find the machine’s wireless Mac address (sometimes known as the “network ID”), so that I could provide the information to my Airport wifi router; figuring out how to do that required a visit to the OLPC wiki, which has lots of helpful information. Hopefully I won’t need to tweak too many other things at the Unix level.
6. The keyboard may not be as small as that of a Blackberry — but it certainly feels that way. I doubt very much that I could ever touch-type on the XO, but a child with small hands might find it perfectly adequate. As for me, I was reduced to cellphone-style typing, i.e., one finger (or thumb) from each hand.
7. The XO doesn’t come with a mouse, but it does have a couple USB ports. So, just for the heck of it, I plugged in my Apple mouse; it worked at first, but after a few moments, the cursor no longer responded. Who knows if it’s supposed to work or not … I haven’t yet had time to read the details.
8. Without a mouse, your interactions with the XO machine (aside from characters typed on the keyboard) are accomplished with a trackpad; apparently part of it can also be used with a stylus, but I haven’t read the details yet. I should also read the details just to see what’s involved with the trackpad, because I’ve been having a very difficult time manipulating it. I had assumed it would be as straightforward and intuitive as the trackpad on my Mac laptop, but that’s definitely not the case.
9. The machine is annoyingly slow; but that’s probably just because I’m accustomed to using a fairly zippy 2.4GHz machine with 4 gigabytes of RAM. If you’re curious about such things, you can read the hardware specs for the XO machine by clicking here; it’s basically a 433MHz X86-class machine with 256 megabytes of RAM, and a one-gigabyte flash-memory mass-storage device (i.e., no rotating-disk hard drive).
10. The XO machine has a camera. I suppose that will turn out to be very handy for certain educational applications; however, I haven’t had the time (or interest) to play with it yet.
11. The XO machine comes with a ton of open-source software, including a Firefox-based browser, a PDF-compatible document viewer, a music synthesis and composition tool, an open-source word processor and text editors, a pixel-paint drawing program, a Gmail-based email program, a calculator, and numerous games; if you want to see the entire list, click here. For what it’s worth, I was unsuccessful at trying to play some YouTube video clips on my XO; but perhaps that was my own fault.

Like so many other technology gadgets, I’m sure that the XO machine is something that requires practice, experimentation, and study (which can be accomplished by reading or browsing the OLPC’s website, wiki, and/or FAQ material). It’s unlikely that I’ll have the time or patience to do very much of that, except out of intellectual curiosity, because the XO is so vastly inferior to my Mac (or most well-equipped Windows/Linus machines) that I can’t imagine using it on a day-to-day basis for “serious” work.

However, if I was a teacher in an educational environment where all of the students in my classroom had XO machines as their only computing device, I would probably have a very different attitude about it. And if I was an inquisitive youngster in a developing nation, I might well find the XO to be an awesome machine. So the comments I’ve made here should not be taken as an insulting criticism of what the OLPC team has done; given their strategic objective of building a credible computing device at an affordable $100 price tag, I think they’ve done a marvelous job. (Of course, the price isn’t really down to $100 yet, but I’m optimistic that it will reach that point within a year or so.)

What’s more interesting to me is to imagine how all of this will evolve over the next, say, 5-10 years. I’ve been looking at an old iMac computer that I gave my mother in 2001, and in almost every dimension, it’s approximately 10 times less powerful than the MacBook I’m currently using. If that same trend continues, then I can imagine the OLPC team building a vintage-2015 computer that’s either 10 times cheaper — i.e., a $10 computer — or 10 times more powerful. Or maybe a little of both: maybe a $25 computer with a larger screen, a couple gigabytes of RAM and 100 gigabytes of mass storage.