(2008-05-21) Smith Olpc Real Status

On an Email List, Daniel Smith says:

Count me as someone who has cooled considerably on OLPC and Negroponte.

IMHO Negroponte should have kept his yap shut on the topic of costs after blatting about the "$100 laptop" so loudly and frequently before. Or made a disarming and humorous remark along the lines of "I've learned that I can't estimate costs, so I'll say only that we're pretty sure it will cost less than the XO."

He says the display will be "the same displays being developed for portable DVD players"--but those aren't touchscreens, like the ones the second-generation XO is supposed to have.

Cost is only one of many expectations that OLPC set for the XO that have not yet been met. They were talking a lot about 20 hour battery life, but the power-management software that would achieve that is still not finished (Olpc Update 1); actual battery life is currently about 4-5 hours. Another, a biggie for me, is that the XO was supposed to have a "view source" button that would show the actual source code for all of the software in the XO, or, at least, all of those written in Python. Well, the button is there but it doesn't do anything.

The software I got with my G1G1 is impressive as an alpha, but has so many rough edges that I gave up using it. For example, you can't take it on an airplane because the XO currently has no provisions for shutting off its WiFi hardware.

My XO has been gathering dust waiting for Update.1, which has continuously been a few weeks away since last December.

The Read application--the XO's ebook-reading software--has just enough rough edges to it to be a showstopper. Someone ported a PDF reader application, got it working, but never seriously looked at it and asked "OK, what's the minimum number of things we need to add to this to make it an eBook reader?"

• It has bugs.

• It has no bookmarks. In theory you shouldn't need one in a Sugar UI "activity" because the Sugar "Journal" should take care of this for all activities. In practice, the Journal, in its current state, is worse than inadequate for this. My XO-owning colleague agrees with me on this.

• If you have a collection of (say) fifty PDF books loaded on your XO, it is very difficult to what books you have and find one of them. Again, this is because the Journal is supposed to take the place of a traditional directory display. However, this relies on the Journal entries having suitable tags and metadata. At the moment, PDF files show up in the Journal with their raw filenames--usually severely truncated. Even if you're willing to type in a search query, the journal entries don't have any metadata that you can use to search on, unless you manually enter this data yourself for every loaded eBook.

• It has other design flaws as well. When you open a PDF file, initially you cannot scroll it with the scroll keys... because the insertion point is prepositioned in a small data entry field. In order to scroll through the file, you must first click inside the page area. Then you need to slide the mouse pointer out of the way so that it doesn't block the text. Only then can you flip the screen around to "tablet" position, close it, and read using only the navigation buttons.