Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project – which brought us the SugarOS-based XO $200 rugged notebook, designed for use in developing nations – has switched tactics and is now concentrating on an iPad-like slate design which it hopes to produce for under $100.
While the original announcement of OLPC’s plans came back in December, the group behind the scheme have now teamed up with low-power processor specialists Marvell to make their dreams a reality – and early design shots show that the new XO 3.0 device could be a real winner in the style stakes.
Announced over on PCMag.com, the deal between OLPC and Marvell will see the companies jointly developing future devices – starting with the XO 3.0 slate, which could be launched as early as 2011, and to be followed by a pair of new rugged XO notebooks. In return, each company gets something it badly needs: OLPC gets the expertise in low-power computing it needs, along with preferential rates on parts to keep the cost of the device below that magic $100 barrier; Marvell, on the other hand, will be given access to OLPC’s reference design and the option to then commercialize the XO 3.0 concept for sale in first-world nations.
Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, described the company’s choice of Marvell as a partner – rather than, for example, AMD or Intel – as being due to a belief that “Marvell was going in the right direction in terms of the capabilities and functions they were putting in their processors, [including] low-powere management.”
Speaking about the slate-format design – a radical departure from the previous convertible tablet-format XO notebooks, which still featured a physical keyboard – McNierney claimed that the slate design is “less expensive, more reliable, it can be lower-cost and lower-power adn that reall is a good design for us.”
As the device is designed to offer developing nations the chance to get its youth up to speed with IT – hence the name of the project – it’s the low cost which is possibly the most important feature, and it’s one that the company will be concentrating on: while McNierney admits the current design of the XO 3.0 slate means that it is above the desired $100 barrier, he believes that by launch it will have dropped below that mark – making it significantly cheaper than Apple’s iPad.
So far firm details as to the specifications of the product aren’t available, but with Marvell on board it’s a given that the XO 3.0 slate will be running on an ARM-based processor and most likely some version of Linux as the operating system.
