Jason Bradbury

My daughter doesn’t know it yet, but for Christmas she’s getting an XO laptop. Gorgeously rugged by design, flash memory and the Linux based, Sugar, operating system and interface – for me, the XO is the freshest look at laptop design for a decade.

The hardware, with it’s chunky long range Wi-Fi antennae, built in camera and mic and all weather keyboard, is only part of the story. The real innovation is is the One Laptop Per Child program that accompanies each XO puchase. Simply put, if you buy an XO when they become available in the UK on 3 Jan 2009 a child in a developing country like Peru or Rwanda gets their own laptop for free. 

Anyone who has a keen interest in tech should check out the Sugar GUI (Graphical User Interface). It’s like nothing I’ve used before – and for that reason it felt a little alien for the first half an hour or so. Not the case with my three-and-a-half year old. My daughter had a play with a review model XO and within minutes she was away, creating the image you can see above in the Paint program and playing sounds with music application TamTamJam. Other apps that caught my eye are Speak, an animated face that talks as you type and Turtle Art, best described as a visual programming language. 

I do not have space to talk about what is original and new in the XO. Highlights for me include: automatic mesh networking (just place a few XO’s near each other and they start talking to each other), e-book mode and swivel screen, four integrated game buttons. Inevitably, users familiar with XP and OSX have found Sugar hard to get used to. Suffice it to say that my little girl moved from wide-eyed to down-with-it in just minutes. For a piece of technology expressly designed for the non-computer literate child, I’d call that mission accomplished. 

Check back here after Christmas as I plan to get my daughter to do her own video review of the XO once Santa has squeezed it down our chimney.

For info or to buy.