First Contact. The XO-1 has a rather unique aesthetic. Raw White and green apple, it can still go almost unnoticed closed – it turn into a suitcase, which is useful for transport, but where nothing is planned for the magazine – but once opened, beyond ears (they are wireless antennas, which also serves to maintain the unit locks closed and protection of communications ports) and apple green keyboard do not discreetly.

The screen is a nice surprise (see box). It does not say much on the keyboard, actually reserved for smaller fingers, or the touchpad, a limited area and occasionally participated mishaps sending the pointer across the screen.

Being able to flip the screen and plate, visible on the keyboard is a good idea, ideal for reading long texts. The button at the bottom left of the screen to rotate the display to orient the pages in the length of the screen. The navigation pad is then also shifted to keep scrolling natural, but the touchpad is likewise not altered – it complicates, for example, the zoom setting of a PDF to paste the screen dimensions , hence the pointer 90 ° to the direction in which we slide a finger.

Use. The XO-1 uses a special interface, called Sugar. It is notable for a display window at a time, always in full screen, which is actually more suited to the small screen of an ultra-portable. It also offers a home page where favorite applications are arranged in a circle and take a hands rather easy.

Basically, the operating system for its part is based on Fedora Linux 9 and X.org graphical interface. It is also possible for hobbyists, to install another Linux – Ubuntu, Debian, or Damn Small Linux and Puppy are known to run on the XO-1 – and Windows XP has been announced for the coming months OLPC hoping to overcome the reluctance of governments accustomed to Microsoft.

However, to use, the XO-1 has a major weakness: its lack of responsiveness. It takes two minutes to start, ten seconds to launch any application … Once it started, everything is fine, but starts are really long and tiresome quickly.

Good idea? Adequate or not, the idea of making computers in the poorest regions of our planet is nice. The achievement is more questionable, mainly by its slowness.

It might have it taken from an existing Linux distribution especially optimized for configurations limited or dispose of some components left to lose a bit in compatibility. After all, we had machines perfectly usable though much slower, taking advantage of suitable operating systems, so it should remain possible.

Outside of that reservation, the device is pretty well thought out, solid and practical. One can also think more worth of computer bases adopted with a device nodes that are no bases at all …

In short, it already looks XO-2 (the cons), proposed recently, which should take the form of a big Nintendo DS and, hopefully, will be a little more responsive. And who should also know a little more success in operations “at a you, a home, becoming home to a nice e-book reader displaying two pages side-by-screw.11