WannabEees: Eee PC vs Elonex One vs OLPC vs EasyNote XS vs MSI Wind and more

By Rory Reid on 12 March 2008, 12:17pm

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OLPC XO-1 (aka One Laptop Per Child)
Finally, we should mention the XO-1, formerly the '$100 laptop', which is designed as part of a charitable project for children in developing nations. As the concept has been kicking around for a few years, it's arguably the inspiration for the Eee. It's not currently on sale to the public, but last year's Give One Get One programme meant for £200, you could keep one and they'd send the other to a starving-but-surprisingly-IT-capable child. Hopefully the offer will be back soon.

The OLPC is undoubtedly one of the weirdest-looking contraptions known to man. It has a rotating 7-inch 1,200x900-pixel screen, runs off an AMD Geode LX-700 CPU, 256MB of super-slow 133MHz RAM, and has 1GB of flash memory, which you can add to via an SD card slot under the screen.

Its quirky ear-like aerials work in conjunction with its 802.11s wireless card to create a mesh network, which means you can piggyback off another XO-1 to share its Internet connection if you're not quite within range. We couldn't get this to work in the congested streets of London, but it'll do better in countries where wireless interference is virtually non-existent and terrain is flat.

You might find the X-O1's Linux user interface tricky to master, but that wasn't much of a problem to us, since we wouldn't be seen dead with one in public anyway -- convenient carry handle or no convenient carry handle.

Read the full OLPC XO-1 review here.