OLPC or One Laptop Per Child organization has joined hands with Amazon.com to sell its XO laptops through the Give One, Get One scheme.
The scheme was initiated with the aim of providing quality education for children in the very poor countries. The idea behind selling the laptops through Amazon.com is to offer two options to buyers. They can either buy one XO laptop for $199 for themselves or buy two laptops for $399 where one will go to a deserving child.
OLPC was able to sell more than 100,000 laptops from November 12th to December 31st 2007 in Canada and US to generate $35 million. These laptops were provided for children residing in Cambodia, Haiti, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia and Afghanistan. Efforts which have commenced this year hopes to surpass last year’s.
The XO laptop measures 7.5 inches and comes with a 433 mega processor. It is a rugged, convertible notebook with a one GB flash memory, 256 MB DRAM, a web cam which is built in, an SD slot and a microphone. The laptop weighs about 3.2 pounds. Sugar, the operating system from last year’s based on GNU/Linux continues to be a part of these laptops.
Some of the preinstalled software includes writing, music editing, basic programming, drawing, distance and sound wave measurement and a simple web browser. They come with both the full color display mode and the sunlight readable black and white high resolution mode.
There is an option of saving power with the CPU which automatically suspends operation selectively. One significant feature is how the XO can be charged with human power which makes it ideal for children in developing countries with no access to electricity.
