The OLPC project is resurrecting its “give one, get one” program that allows end users in developed countries to purchase the XO laptop which is designed for children in developing nations. The idea is that you pay about twice the cost of an XO and you get one while another is donated to a young person.

Last year the price tag was $399 and you could order directly through the OLPC web site. This year Amazon will be handling the sales. It’s not clear if the price will be higher or lower this year. On the one hand, production costs have probably come down a bit. On the other hand, OLPC is expected to release a version of the XO laptop that runs both Linux and Windows XP in the next month or two. So you might be able to pay a few bucks extra to get a dual boot XO.

So the One Laptop Per Child initiative hasn’t exactly managed to put a laptop in the hands of every kid on the face of the earth. But this week the group did manage to outfit every single child in one country with a laptop. That country is Niue, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific.

How tiny? Like 1500 people tiny. I’ve lived in buildings with more residents than Niue. A donation of 500 laptops was enough for every child in the country to have one. But hey, OLPC has finally lived up to its name. That’s got to be worth something, right?

Laptop Magazine’s Joanna Stern got to spend a couple hours playing with one of those newfangled XO Laptops preloaded with Windows XP the other day. Microsoft is offering Windows XP Starter Edition licenses for just $3 to customers in developing nations. On the one hand, this helps Microsoft fend off any challenges from Linux or other operating system in a largely untapped market. On the other hand, it also gives new computer users in developing nations access to the most widely used operating system in the world. And if the goal is to bridge the digital divide and encourage computer literacy, that matters.

The XO Laptop has just 1GB of flash memory onboard, which isn’t nearly enough to run Windows XP, so the operating system runs off of a removeable 4GB SD card. Eventually the OLPC developers will include a dual boot screen that lets users decide which operating system to boot into, but for now if the card is plugged in, you boot into Windows. If it’s pulled out, you but into the Linux-based Sugar OS.

Stern has posted a bunch of pictures of the XO running various Windows applications, as well as a few hands-on videos. In a nutshell, it sounds like the XO does a decent, if not steller job with Windows. It takes nearly 90 seconds to boot, slows down significantly if you have more than one window open, and online video playback is choppy. But if you launch just one or two programs at a time, it seems to work fairly well. In other words, the XO runs Windows XP about as well as a computer from 2000 would run it. While a faster processor would certainly help performance, the biggest bottleneck is probably the 256MB of RAM. Double or quadruple that and I’m sure the XO could do a better job of multitasking.

It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pick up an XO running XP in developed nations in Europe or North America anytime soon. But when you think about it, without the OLPC we probably wouldn’t have had the Asus Eee PC, and without that this web site and all the topics I cover probably wouldn’t exist. So it’s worth keeping an eye on those crazy folks over at the OLPC Foundation because the stuff they’re working on today tends to be the stuff we all take for granted tomorrow.

Sure, research analysts at Gartner may say the mythical $100 laptop is at least 3 years away. But apparently the folks at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore never got the memo. Because IDG News reports that they’re developing a laptop that will be sold for just $100, (not $10 as earlier reports suggested)

Now let’s be clear, there are a lot of things we don’t know about this laptop. Will it be the size of a ping pong table and weigh 70 pounds? Maybe. But it will be cheap. You know, if it ever graduates from the vaporware stage.

It’s also not clear whether the PC will actually be worth just $10 or if the government will be dumping huge subsidies into the project to make the computer as affordable as possible. While India certainly has an up and coming economy, there are huge portions of the country that have little or no access to the internet. If these cheap computers use some sort of mesh networking feature like the one included in the OLPC XO Laptop, they could go a long way toward bridging the digital divide.

It’s been a while since anyone referred to the OLPC XO Laptop as the $100 laptop. You know, unless they were joking. But once upon a time, that was Nicholas Negroponte’s dream: to produce a notebook for under $100. Now, the OLPC project never planned to make a profit off of these notebooks, but a lot of folks swooned at the idea of a low cost computer. When Asus first announced the Eee PC, the company promised a $200 computer. By the time the Eee PC 4G came to market, Asus was charging $400, but you can pick up a 2G model for $300. Not exactly a hundred bills, but we’re getting closer.

Consulting and analysis firm Gartner is predicting that it’ll be 3 years before we see an actual $100 laptop. Here’s the argument: While there’s an increasing demand for cheap laptops and parts, which will help drive down the cost of components, software, assembly, and distribution costs aren’t going down anytime soon.

There’s another thing that will likely keep us from hitting the $100 price point. Computer makers are already seeing slimmer profit margins on cheap computers like the Eee PC or Acer Aspire One. They have a financial incentive not to let the costs drop too far. If people are willing to pay $200 to $600 for a cheap, ultraportable computer, why offer one for under $100 when the profit margins will be slimmer?

Of course, it is possible to slap together a PC with really crappy parts and sell it for a low, low price. Even if you have to place a minimum order of 50, Alibaba is selling a rebranded Alpha 400 laptop for $130. But you get what you pay for, and in this case, it’s a PC with a 400MHz CPU, practically no RAM, and a proprietary version of Linux. Given the choice between the “world’s cheapest laptop” and a model that costs twice the price but lets me choose my operating system, includes built-in WiFi, and has a CPU that runs faster than my Dell Axim PDA, I’m going to go with the pricier model.

Microsoft is moving along with plans to get a custom version of Windows XP up and running on the OLPC XO Laptop. The company has been working on a way to run Windows from a flash card, since the XO Laptop ships with just 1GB of storage capacity, which isn’t enough space for XP. Microsoft’s James Utzschneider says recently Microsoft internally released to manufacturing the version of Windows XP for the XO Laptop.

The company has no plans to offer this version of XP to the general public. While the XO Laptop is primarily aimed at students in developing nations, the OLPC group offered a promotion for a while allowing people to “buy 1, give 1.” In other words, you could pay $400 and one laptop would be donated to someone who needs it while another would be sent to you for your gadget collection.

According to Utzschneider it looks like if you currently have an XO sitting on your shelf you’re going to have to be content with Linux, because Windows XP will only be available in September to governments and educational customers placing bulk orders.

[via ZDNet]

Those wacky OLPC folks have been working with Microsoft on a way to cram Windows XP onto the XO Laptop for a few months now. And while we’ve already seen video evidence of Windows running on the hardware, Gizmodo has what appears to be the first video showing a single XO Laptop dual booting Linux and Windows XP.

I tend to avoid writing stories about the OLPC XO Laptop because it’s not really targeted at consumers. I’m much more interested in laptops you can walk into a store and buy, or at least order online from Taiwanese dealers. But if Nicholas Negroponte hadn’t turned his dream of a low cost laptop into reality, it’s possibel that the Asus Eee PC and all the low cost mini-notebooks that have followed it never would have existed. So every now and then it’s worth taking a peek at OLPC land.

I don’t spend a lot of time covering the XO Laptop on Liliputing because I’m primarily focused on consumer oriented laptops that you can walk into a store and buy. The XO Laptop, on the other hand is really targeted at govenments and educational institutions. But OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte has announced that the group will be brinigng back the Give 1, Get 1 program in August or September. That means you’ll be able to pick up an XO Laptop for about $400. That’s about twice what the laptop actually costs, but you’re actually purchasing 2 computers, one for yourself, and one for a child in a developing nation.

Over the past few months we’ve heard inklings that Microsoft was in talks with the OLPC project to test Windows XP on the low-cost XO laptop. Now the New York Times is reporting that the OLPC organization will rollout a limited trial of Windows XP in four or five countries next month. If things go well, we could see a wider release by Septemeber.

Darren Waters at the BBC is spending the next week tinkering with one of Intel’s Classmate 2 laptop computers. In the video above you can see he’s also spent some time with the OLPC XO Laptop, and he clearly highlights some of the differences between the devices. While both are aimed at developing nations, the XO represents a whole new way to think about computers, while the Classmate is designed for Windows XP and lets users experience computers much the same way that users in developed nations would. But smaller.

Waters reports that the Classmate 2 is capable of performing most individual tasks without a problem, but thanks to its poky processor it doesn’t hold up to multitasking very well. Like the XO Laptop, the Classmate 2 uses mesh networking to share internet connections with other nearby computers.

We should be getting a full review in about a week, as well as a complete review from someone closer to the target audience, 9 year old Rufus Cellan-Jones who reviewed the XO for the BBC last year.

If you think there are a lot of low-cost ultraportable computers hitting the market this year, just wait. Intel officials say the company expects low-cost computer shipments to top 100 million between now and 2011. Meanwhile, Asus president Jerry Shen expects to sell 10 million Eee PCs in 2008 and twice as many next year. This all according to a report from DigiTimes.

Now, this could all be a case of counting chickens before they hatch. After all, while the Asus Eee PC is selling like pancakes, all that shows is that the computer is filling a niche. It remains to be seen exactly how large that niche is. Originally low-cost computers like the XO Laptop and the Classmate PC were targeted at educational markets and developing nations. Now we’re starting to see similar computers marketed toward consumers in developed nations as well. But does everybody who owns a computer need a low-powered device without an optical drive to compliment their existing desktop or laptop? I mean, I know I do, but I’m a bit crazy like that.

On the other hand, we’re starting to see another trend in the liliputing market. While the first few low-cost laptops like the XO, Classmate, and Eee PC all sported flash memory and slow processors, newer models like the HP 2133 come packed with large hard drives and marginally faster processors. And soon Intel and VIA will each release their next generation low-voltage, high(er) performance chips which should give these tiny laptops quite a speed boost, making it possible that we could start to see people picking liliputers up as primary computers, not secondary ones.