XO Laptop – Second Impressions

As I wrote last week, we got an XO laptop for our 12 year old daughter as part of OLPC’s Give a Laptop, Get a Laptop program.

Our first impression of the XO Laptop was that this was a really cool little laptop.

And it is. A computer that has built in video, audio, internet browsing and file sharing for just about $200? That’s amazing.

The XO is a big hit among the populations for which it was designed – kids in the third world. Read how the XO is transforming life in a Peruvian Village.

But after almost a week of fiddling with it here in America, we’ve decided the XO just doesn’t completely fit the my kid’s computing needs. Which is totally fine – it was never meant to. So what follows is not complaining and is not meant to be a negative review. It’s just the facts of our little experiment to see if the XO could be my daughter’s personal computer.

Our XO Experience

After fiddling around with the video camera and the internet, it was time to get down to work. Truth be told, we had little use for most of the games and actvities loaded on the XO – activities meant for a learning environment. The games my daughter did access were fun and easy to use. But we focused mostly on the activities she uses most – internet, writing and music.

While the XO multi-tasks, programs load slowly. Web based email worked fine, but we still cannot figure out how to save attachments. Some web pages load smaller versions, and it’s a bit like web browsing using your cell phone. Other pages load fully, but you have to scroll to see the whole page n the small screen.

The XO really saves activities, not files, in something called Journal. Naming a doc requires opening the journal entry for the activity that generated it. Journal entries pile up quickly, and it’s a bit slow scrolling through them to find a file, especially for someone like myself used to a folder tree system.

The word processor is just fine, but there is no printing (yet) and not a smooth interface with Microsoft Word or Publisher, making document sharing difficult for my daughter, who edits her school newspaper. File sharing with the XO is meant to happen among groups of XO users, but we’re the only users in our laptop’s range.

There is no way to play Itunes on the XO, so a kid who has her music stored there will be unable to use the XO for this. I gave up trying to figure out if I could use some other Linux-based program for this, as it is pretty much beyond my tech skills.

I tried to chat online with other XO users in my neighborhood, but no one accepted my invitation to chat. Maybe they don’t know how to use this feature.

And finally, the pointer is jumpy, a source of continuing frustration. (A fix is due soon.)

My daughter, God bless her, was willing to stick with the XO and work between it and the family computer till upgrades later next year. But it felt to me as though this gift, given with such love and received after much anticipation, was becoming more of a burden for her than a joy.

So, yesterday we bought her a laptop at the local tech superstore for a great price. It was a model that is being discontinued, but what do we care? It’s already 10 times better than my 4 year old laptop…. Of course, she’s flying with it. Listening to tunes while writing articles for the paper, checking email and planning on uploading and editing the videos that she and her friends have made. I’ve only had to get involved to help her set up E-mail and update her antivirus software, both tasks I can do without having to read a manual.

Other Families’ XO experiences

Read another family’s entirely different experience giving an XO to their kid – He’s younger and clearly more tech-minded than my kid or me.

This Dad clearly spent a bit more time with his kid on the XO than I did with mine, and it shows.

Both these kids were under age 10, which may be why they picked up on this system faster than my 12 year old, who already was used to current operating systems and had her own idea of what a computer should be able to do.

Bottom Line

The XO is a great laptop for the price. In fact, it is an amazing laptop for the price, especially since for every one you buy, one gets given.

If you don’t need to rely on the XO for all your computing needs, are interested in playing around with Linux and are willing to wait for the upgrades that will make it a bit more user-friendly here in the second world, then it is a fabulous laptop for your kid. Printing should be available by mid 2008, and there are even rumors of a change to a Windows platform.

But if your kid is like mine, namely not too tech-savvy and already used to the computing environments offered by Apple or Microsoft, the XO alone will likely not serve his/her computing needs.

And that’s okay – After all, the XO was not built for my kid. It was built for kids whose families cannot afford even one computer, let alone our family, where the one laptop, one cellphone, one digital camera per person program is in full swing.

My question now, of course, is what to do with the XO we have. There is not yet a program for donating it back, which was my first thought. On second thought, I hear they are going for up to $600 on E-Bay…

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More XO Reviews

Aaron Landry – has two articles on the XO, and great discussion in the comments section
Ubuntu tutorials – Nice sum up of specs
NY Times review by David Pogue
Notebookreview.com – very complete review
David Seah – First Impressions