next »

[Wayan Vota]

So two weeks ago, I happened to be at a conference with SJ Klien and he was showing off two XO laptops to attendees.  One was a regular XO, while the other had a modified touchpad, with a few other cosmetic changes.  It didn't seem to be the XO 1.5, until I started thinking - why would OLPC change the case, unless they also changed the internals too?

So kids, what do you think?  Is this the XO-1 and the XO-1.5 together & in the wild, an OLPC News exclusive?



Clink on the image for a closeup and let me know your opinion below...

[Mike Lee]

I got this same shot back in March 2009 of the new 1.0 case sitting on Richard Smith's desk at OLPC HQ (with permission). At least the parts of the case that are shown in these photos are not unique to the XO 1.5. New 1.0s coming off the production line have the new smaller trackpad. There was talk of some change to the outside of the case that would make the XO 1.5 identifiable at a glance. It's possible that the beta 1.5 machines don't have the new case design tweak because the plastics aren't done yet. I also hope they haven't bagged making a change due to costs. It will be really important to be able to quickly separate 1.5 from 1.0 without having to stick on labels.

Mike

[Wayan Vota]

Well it looks like we will see the real XO 1.5 here in DC on Sept 8:

Tuesday HacDC Seminar: One Laptop Per Child

Samuel "SJ" Klein, One Laptop per Child's community content director, will speak on the progress of the worldwide effort towards delivering low-cost exploratory computation to millions of children in developing countries. The project was just showcased in the new book, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People.

To date, nearly one million laptops have been deployed around the world, typically in the remotest of locations with little or no electricity, or internet access. Empowering learning through information accessibility will  be the focus of SJ's talk along with the market-changing innovations in the  platform's hardware and software.  SJ will also show a working prototype of One Laptop per Child's brand new  XO-1.5 laptop, which uses a newer, faster processor and has more onboard memory. The XO 1.5 now dual boots into Gnome desktop as well as the child-friendly Sugar Learning Platform. Both are based on Fedora 11.

The OLPC Learning Club DC and HacDC will announce their joint effort to launch an XO Lending Library and describe local activities that support OLPC and Sugar Labs. Please join us if you want to talk about redesigning education access throughout the world for the 21st Century.

Where: HacDC (1525 Newton Street NW, Washington, DC) in the church sanctuary
When: Tuesday, September 8th, 7:30pm

[Mike Lee]

To answer the title of this thread...

The new OLPC XO-1.5 laptop needed some subtle change to its case so that at a glance, users could tell the new apart from the old. To avoid potentially tens of thousands of dollars of new injection mold work, the OLPC engineers decided to just change the plastic color from white to green of the screen rotation, power and two battery latch buttons. This approach was confirmed by an OLPC wiki entry about the XO-1.5 B2 laptop.

<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_1.5_B2#Identification" rel="nofollow">wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_1.5_B2#Identification[/url]

I went ahead and made some renderings of the changes based on previous photos of the latest XO-1.0 since we may not see the actual case changes for several more weeks.

~

[generallud]

Another big difference i see immediately is that the giant XO symbol in the center of the back is gone (or am i seeing the wrong view?). Doesn't this decrease the recognition of this machine?.

It seems like a better approach might just be to leave the giant XO and add 1.5 underneath, or put a big colored circle around it? . This shouldn't be one of those "planned obsolescence" commercial issues where we try to stroke the ego of consumers by putting something on the product to let them think they are spending  their money for something "new and improved" 

Actually the description of XO 1.5 where booting into gnome or sugar is a radical change.  Any chance of providing an update to my two (G1G1 December 2008) existing machines with this capability?

Regards

[GeoLeoX]

Another big difference i see immediately is that the giant XO symbol in the center of the back is gone (or am i seeing the wrong view?).

Wrong view. The XO logo is on the top side, this is the bottom (battery) side.