Pogue Praises O.L.P.C. XO

When we posted two weeks ago that the OLPC XO would be sold in North America for a two-week period, it was only a matter of time before someone got their hands on one and gave it a review. That person this time around is David Pogue, who seemed to have fallen in love with it.

Of course, this isn’t a PC that a performance user would want to use, but that’s not who it’s developed for, as Pogue points out. He did mention that it had features that even surpassed those of our own laptops, including a solar-panel for recharging the battery, a battery that could be recharged far more times than conventional laptop batteries and also the fact that it’s drop-proof, liquid-proof and dirt-proof. Not bad for a $200 system. Almost makes your laptop green with envy, hmm?

And sure enough, the bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop. “Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows laptop,” they say. Clearly, the XO’s mission has sailed over these people’s heads like a 747. The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.

Source: New York Times