OLPC to restart charity sales
OLPC FOUNDER and CEO Nicholas Negroponte opened the project's Global Country Workshop Tuesday by announcing that it would resume its Give One Get One laptop donation programme and showing off a prototype of its second generation product, the XO-2 laptop-ebook-tablet PC.
Negroponte said the MIT Media Lab-sponsored One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project will restart its charity sales offering in August or September. OLPC's Give One Get One (GOGO) deal enables idealistic punters in the US and Europe to buy one of its innovative ultramobile XO laptop PCs for $376 while donating a second XO PC to a child in a developing country who otherwise couldn't afford one.
OLPC has sold about 600,000 XO PCs, 162,000 of them through its GOGO programme that ended - some thought prematurely - last December.
The project recently abandoned its former open sauce software vision and fell under the Vole's influence by announcing it would also work with Microsoft to port a cut-down version of Windows XP to the XO laptop. However, it's unclear if buyers will be able to choose Windows XP in the next round of the offering, as the project reportedly has yet to work out a software licensing deal with Microsoft.
Negroponte also showed a prototype of OLPC's second generation XO PC, the XO-2, due for release sometime in 2010. He wasn't very specific about the new machine's hardware configuration details, instead talking about the versatile multifunction form factor planned for the XO-2.
Apparently the XO-2 PC will be much smaller, about half the size of the original model, and will deploy a transformer-like e-book form factor that the user can adjust into one of three configurations for different uses. Negroponte declared, "The next generation laptop should be a book."
The XO-2 will have two touch-screen displays (a bit like a Nintendo DS) that can be arranged either as left and right pages viewed vertically, as conventiona l hinged laptop screen and keyboard surfaces horizontally, or as a flat, contiguous two-screen tablet surface. The XO-2's two touch-sensitive display surfaces will employ the XO's unique dual-mode indoor and sunlight viewable display technology.
The OLPC project said in a conference press release that the XO-2 PC's power consumption target is one watt and its price objective is $75. The Associated Press coverage is here. ยต
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The previous GOGO program dried up when Mr. Negroponte killed the "Open Source, Freedom, they can actually learn how computers work" scenario by making it just another Windoze-XP laptop.

Many, many people who bought OLPC's feel betrayed, and I think they're justified. It's been turned into just another "Hook 'em while they're young, and they'll be addicted for life" Windoze for kids giveaway.

He tricked these people once, but now they're ANGRY and unlikely to be suckered by his hand-waving and feel-good platitudes again. They're gonna want specifics, because he's now just another MS-monopoly-serving hardware vendor. Maybe even LESS honest than most of the others.
Surely it's not that hard to make the machine capable of running either XP *or* Linux? If he's insisting on 3 different form-factors in the same machine he should be able to allow 2 different OSes... :)