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Having had my hands on one of these things for a few minutes, and reading Jon Camfield’s concerns about the laptop, one has to wonder about the projects chances of success. Some of his concerns, particularly the maintenance and damage costs, seem very real.
Oh, make no mistake, the olpc is impressive. The turnaround time to product has been remarkable (especially for an initiative that started quasi-academically). The laptop is actually cool. It works well, the software performs decently (certainly no worse than my MacBook does at average things like textediting and webviewing). There are some strange things that jump right out though.
The controls feel tiny. The buttons, and the trackpad just feel very tiny. Of course, the target demographic for this are kids, who have tiny fingers and there was obvious importance on keeping the size of the laptop down in general. The users, however, will be novices and getting used to typing on such a small keyboard may be harder than a not-small one.
The other (more pressing) concern is that it feels a little fragile. It certainly doesn’t feel (yet) like a rugged thing you could drop in the middle of the jungle and hope to last. The plastic feels fragile (read: brittle) and the weighting is a little strange. The screen is heavy, the keyboard is not. In some modes (closed, keyboard hidden, etc…) this makes sense. Other times I worry that it will just snap off. Where is the rubber or super-plastic?
Still, I’m pretty sure it would sell well in the States.