The queen is having an anus horribilis - Dave Evans
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Microsoft snubs the OLPC tablet
THE ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD project has said that its upcoming XO-3 tablet will not use a Windows operating system.
OLPC's chairman Nicholas Negroponte has always wanted the Vole to join the party. Last year he said that the organization was urging Microsoft to make a full version of Windows available for the earlier XO-2, which was based on an ARM processor.
The XO-2 was later cancelled and now the XO-3 will also use an ARM chip. Ed McNierney, OLPC's CTO told PC World that it has ruled out loading multiple versions of Windows on the tablet.
He said that OLPC has no evidence that Microsoft will make full-featured Windows 7 available to run on an ARM processor. While ARM chips can run Windows Mobile, Microsoft's next mobile OS Windows Phone 7 is not what OLPC has in mind.
McNierney said the new XO-3 tablet will be a fully functional computing device, not a smartphone or a PDA. Windows Phone 7 is designed for those markets, not for general-purpose computing.
An XO-3 prototype will be displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show early next year running Google's Android OS, Negroponte said in an e-mail. By January 2012, the XO-3 will likely be running a different Linux based operating system.
Current XO laptops run Linux with the Sugar platform, which provides an education-specific user interface.
There's a bit more technical information and a picture of the XO-3 tablet here. µ
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This won't be available for $75, or even under $100. They planned to be able to do it with the last one, and they couldn't. Why think they can do it this time?
Windows NT 3.51 could run natively on Intel RISC, MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha processors. They're not incapable, they just can't be bothered anymore or see the return on investment as being too little.
Well this is what OLPC gets. The President if I recall correctly decided that linux/sugar was a waste of time, and that they would be better served by windows, which was the dumbest thing since the whole goal was to make the laptop as cheap as possible. Not kissing M$ butt.
Oh well maybe they learned their lesson, but I doubt it.
...but it isn't coming out till 2012? If ever?
I'm not sure what the so-called developing world needs as a computing platform, but with mobile phones catching on there, I think it may be either a phone, or a thing tethered to a phone, that they should go for.
And I like speech recognition for input, but in so many ways it is expensive - programming the device to recognise a spoken language, and then providing the processor speed to interpret efficiently. So maybe that is ruled out.
I also like the touchscreen keyboard called Fitaly - it is much faster than handwriting - but it takes time to learn it, and it's doubtful that the small company that published it will support this model of OLPC - not that they aren't generous...
M$ can obviously port an os to different chips, they put CE on MIPS, ARM, and Hitachi SuperH processors.
The question is, why would they bother with OLPC? It would only be beneficial if they think it will help them get market share from people paying premium prices in the future. Given that OLPCs are being sold in 3rd world countries to kids who will probably not grow up and buy PCs in the near future, M$ can turn their backs on OLPC.
So last decade. Nobody cares, folks. You renegged on just about everything you promised (price, functionality, OS), and nobody cares anymore.
Microsoft cannot port Windows to non-x86 architectures. Even if it could, the only selling point for Windows is all these proprietary apps that only run on x86, which will never be ported to anything else.