oddbill

I spent some time yesterday sitting at a sidewalk table in front of a coffee shop, browsing online with an xo, the first generation OLPC.

I picked this one up this past November during the annual Give One Get One program. I’ve always thought this thing looked neat. In reality, the physical machine is very cool, but the OS on it, a GUI called Sugar over a custom Linux distro, is just awful. Supposedly designed not so much as an OS, but as a learning facilitating platform, the academics behind that atrocity literally tossed everything the western world has learned about computer interface design over the last 30 years and made up a new, arbitrary and very, very awkward interface themselves. It is seriously terrible. I defy you, as a new user, to write a simple text document, save it, close it, then find it again. I dare you. I’ll check back in on your progress in a couple of hours.

So extremely disappointed, I put the poor little machine aside for a while, and have only recently started carrying it around again and testing it’s ability to connect to wifi spots around the city. As a simple web browsing netbook, it’s actually not that bad. The custom browser is very, very simplified, lacking many things that would make life easier, but it is functional and its simplicity has the unintended virtue of focusing your attention. No series of 5 tabs loading different things simultaneously to juggle. Its eBook mode, with the backlight of the screen turned off, so you are reading a surface like Amazon’s Kindle is easily the killer feature of this machine. I can’t exaggerate how pleasant it is to read things in this manner. It is very, very nice. With the backlight off, the battery life also significantly improves.

But, sitting out in front of the coffee shop yesterday, and unexpected but interesting feature of the xo came to light – something like 7 or 8 complete strangers passing by stopped to ask me what this little computer was, and where did I get it! Some of these strangers were quite attractive!

I’m beginning to think the real killer feature of this little, green, rabbit-eared adorable button of a computer is it’s ability to stand in for a puppy or a baby as an accessory to attract strangers of the opposite sex in public places.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Oddversational. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. If your comment does not appear immediately, it may have fallen into the moderation pool. Don't worry, it will show up soon!