I finally got to play with a pukka One Laptop Per Child laptop on Friday. I’d heard sniffy things about it, and indeed I bought an Asus eeePC for myself as you can’t buy the OLPC in the UK. I expected to be unimpressed, but it’s a very nice machine – and the display is brilliant. Turn the backlight off and you get a very, very crisp monochrome display that can be read in direct sunlight. It even folds back on itself to become an ‘ebook’-style tablet. The OLPC and my eeePC made a very sweet couple sitting side-by-side.
I got to play with one thanks to Tom Hannen in the BBC World Service, and good luck to him in trying to get folk there to do something for it – it should be right up the World Service’s street. He’s written a great little Speak and Spell toy for it, and I fancied having a go at writing a simple program myself. So I’ve been messing around with emulators – sadly it’s too slow to be useful on my old Apple G4 PowerBook, but I got it to fairly fly on a WindowsXP laptop which can take advantage of having an Intel / X86 processor.
This is a bit odd, though… check out these weird symbols that appear VERY briefly twice when you shut down the OLPC. It’s like something out of Lost:
