Are retail sales planned? If not then I can't get one so my opinion is that it's irrelevant to me.

I am all for the first answer: "Genius, OLPC has done it again".

The reason for my vote is not that I find the XO-2 such a stroke of genius but because OLPC has finally found a genius new strategy to accommoddate to the new present and future situtation. And this new genius strategy is much more robust and prone to success because it does not anymore solely depend on the scarce resources of OLPC alone but it taps into the resources of a whole and potent industry.

What is that new genius strategy?
What is the new situation in the market place since the start of the OLPC project?

The XO is not any longer the only viable school laptop available. There is a fast growing number of competitive school laptops in the meantime. Right now the XO still has a few unique hardware features. But their uniqeness will diminish fast over time. Intel launched their Atom CPU with 45nm-technology. It is low price, low power consumption but by far outperforming the XO CPU. This will probably be the core of the next generation (in one year's time) in this class of laptops. The dual mode screen and the mesh network will probably soon be available to all competitors. If OLPC sticks with its XO-1 for too long it will be out of the picture in 2-3 years. Therefore the strategic decision to split Sugar and XO is very correct in this situation. Sugar shall be executable on any competing hardware and OS ensuring that also the competing laptops carry OLPC's idea of better (construtionist) education into the classrooms.

On the other side - as Negroponte told - OLPC has to focus more on their laptops and keep coming up with always cheaper, lower power but higher performing laptops in order to force the competition to follow or even surpass OLPC. If OLPC stops doing that all hardware manufacturers will go back to the old "higher, faster, better" strategy in order to increase their margins. The direction OLPC is forcing the industry is not one they would take on their own. They only follow this new direction (very low price) in order not to be shut out of a new huge market even if the margins are uncomfortably low.

With this dual strategy OLPC's initial goal to equip a huge number of kids with affordable laptops running constructivist software is pursued even better and faster than OLPC could achieve on their own. A whole industry is being forced to pursue it against their own interest (lower margins). I think this is a pretty genius strategy.

In 3-5 years there will be many countries rolling out different brands of cool, low priced school laptops with different low priced or free (as in beer and speech) operating systems running different flavours of sugar and different mixtures of global and localised learning content. And the genius about it is that exactly this is a bull's eye on any version of OLPC's mission statement eventhough we must accept that not all school laptops will be coloured green/white and run Redhat.

My answer:
6-none of the above.

I have a Nintendo DS, I program it using homebrew, my conclusion: This design is the future(small,two screens, shell when no in use, no keyboard, microphone as input), but we need software designed for it(voice and hand strokes recognition). The X02 is a great idea IMHO, BUT NOT ONLY FOR KIDS!!!.

Allen is so correct. Governments should be answering this question since they are the only customers.

i'm basically with allen on this

i think Nick is trying to push the competition in the direction that he wants to go in. also he had so much success getting the XO-1 just how he wanted it, that perhaps he is hoping to have just as much luck

however...the device itself is completely insane...and i dont mean that in a nice way. check out the specs sometime. Basically its half the size of the current one, which makes me wonder just who in the heck is going to be able to type on this thing, and is supposed to be even lower powered and yet more powerful.

i say the XO-2 should just be a modified XO-1, not an entirely new system. more powerful, cheaper, a standard laptop sized keyboard that is broken into 2 parts that fold ontop of each other, and a webcam that is on the top middle of the monitor rather than on the side...and that can swivel. at very least the ability to have the cam face the other side so that the xo can be used much more effectively than it currently can be as a camera. I have seen ways around the situation with the cam, but i think this should simply be corrected.

i guess we'll see huh? but yeah...my money says he's more about trying to manipulate everyone else than himself creating this crazy new design

I'm sure if the design stay like the early illustration suggest, it means that XO-2 will use ARM-based CPU which has lower cache. So, it could be problematic for CPU-intensive applications.