Susuto

I’ve used one of the OLPC’s extensively for testing it out, so I hope some of my impressions can help those who are wondering about getting one:

First off, this is NOT a good ultraportable laptop. This is not an EEE pc where you can pretty easily do work with it. In fact, I recommend not thinking of it as a normal computer at all. You’re not going to be playing MP3’s on it, or editing word documents or anything like that.

This laptop is designed, and fairly well designed at that, for kids in countries with poor educational systems. It’s meant to give a student a cheap system that can be used to work on small documents (that can’t really be printed or anything, just transferred to other OLPC’s), use low-fi chat with other nearby systems, etc. It’s a collaboration machine.

What the machine is good at would be things like browsing the internet, or reading an e-book on (well, it does this fairly decently at least) or doing simple science experiments. Heck, it actually is also pretty good for an elementary school student if you want them to learn Python, as it is specifically designed to help people learn how to program in that.

But again, I want to caution people against buying this as if it were something that you could buy as a more world-friendly version of an EEE pc. I guarantee the first time you tried to type out anything on the keyboard you’d start regretting your decision.

(As one other plus, if you happen to be on college campuses a lot chicks seem to actually dig this laptop. So there’s an unintended benefit.)