Slashdot Log In
Comparing the OLPC, Classmate and Eee
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Mar 03, 2008 01:51 PM
from the choose-but-choose-wisely dept.
from the choose-but-choose-wisely dept.
ZDOne writes "Small and inexpensive notebooks have been a hot topic in recent months as the Classmate, XO laptop, and the Asus Eee go head-to-head with each other for the low end/educational market. ZDNet has a look at all three systems, comparing the three platforms on multiple points of data to determine which of the three fits your needs. 'In terms of overall stylishness the Eee is the winner, but the XO and the Classmate are both more rounded and rugged, and come with carrying handles. The OLPC XO has the biggest screen, an innovative 7.5in. dual-mode transmissive/reflective LCD that can swivel from traditional clamshell mode to 'e-book' mode with the screen facing outwards, tablet-style (although it's not a touch-screen). The Classmate and Eee both have similar, rather cramped, 7in. TFT displays. '"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Can one develop software on the XO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lately I've been entertaining the idea of moving to somewhere in the developing world where all the kids have XOs, and teaching them to code.
I've seen two maps of the Earth that led to this idea. One was a photo of the entire Earth taken at night, made from many satellite photos mosaiced together. The other is a live display that they have in a lobby at Google, that shows a real-time display of queries submitted to their search engine, in the form of bright spikes whose height is proportional to the rate of query submissions.
In both of these, most of the world was lit up - except for Africa. South Africa had some light, but most of Africa was dark.
Maybe if we taught African kids to write software, they could start businesses that would make their lives better.
Re:Can one develop software on the XO? (Score:5, Informative)
'Hides' is probably the wrong word. One of the activities is a terminal, with which you can browse the conventional Linux filesystem normally. You can SSH into the XO, and use terminal commands to install new software. You can even install a new desktop environment (e.g. xfce) to replace sugar if you prefer. It's a low-power machine, but it's running a full-featured Linux distro.
Parent
I do recommend Python for beginners (Score:3, Interesting)
It happens that I studied Russian in college. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I had a similar idea, not so much to teach kids but to help exisiting Russian software engineers start software businesses so they could trade with the West.
I happened to meet Esther Dyson when she came to speak at Apple, where I worked at the time. She had traveled extensively in Russia, trying to bootstrap the software industry. When I told her my idea, she grabbed my arm and impe
Funny you mention Python. (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost all apps in Sugar are written in Python and their code is readily available and freely editable from inside Sugar. They are safely sandboxed so you won't break anything permanently, but you're encouraged to modify existing ones and write new ones - using the libraries in the system.
The laptop is meant to reveal its layers to the kid as the kid's experience grows. First - games and activities accessible by big, friendly buttons. Then, two of the activities are different programming toys - procedural, building program from bricks, and event-driven one. You gain basics of programming. Then you press a specific button and you get the source of the underlying app. At first you learn by modifying it, editing it - change colors, change texts, maybe move things around a bit. The python code is clean and well commented. Then you can try your own "hello world" and write your own python software that will run under Sugar. As you become expert at Python, you'll learn to use the mysterious "terminal" thing and write without GUI, download other libraries and languages. Nothing is unavailable, but to make sense of some parts you need experience in the easier ones. A 6yo who just begins to learn reading won't find Python sources very interesting, and won't mess with them at least until the brick-language becomes too limiting.
Parent
They need to earn foreign exchange... (Score:5, Insightful)
I applaud the efforts of government and charity to improve living conditions by donating money, but it won't be sustainable until those in need can earn the money through the sweat of their own brows.
Look at what it's doing for India, that they built the Indian Institutes of Technology, whose graduates are now doing software development for worldwide customers.
And yes, I realize this isn't patriotic.
Parent
Re:They need to earn foreign exchange... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:They need to earn foreign exchange... (Score:5, Informative)
1) A basic paved road, with maintenance, infrastructure to create fuel, infrastructure to transport fuel, infrastructure to create cars, infrastructure to maintain cars, training in driving, compensation for human error
2) A basic rail system, with maintenance, a renewable energy system, with maintenance
The rail system has a greater upfront cost, but negligible ongoing cost. They did feasibility studies in my region, and determined that it would take around 20 million dollars to set it up.
They didn't have the budget, and they're not allowed to save for next year or their funding gets reduced, so they instead blew their 5 million buying buses that kneel to let disabled passengers on and have a signal system to change traffic lights.
Total waste of money, doesn't fix the transportation problems, leaves us relying on fossil fuels, and if the political system allowed them to save up for new infrastructure with their federal money, they could have paid for it in less than 5 years with the money they wasted on nothing at all.
Someone here is ignorant and naive, but it isn't me.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As for the buses- people in wheelchairs are human too. They deserve access to public transportation. That means they need buses that have some sort of ramp or kneeling system.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
2) A basic rail system, with maintenance, a renewable energy system, with maintenance (emphasis mine)
The renewable energy part is a problem. You think you're going to put sails on an AmTrak train? Find a windfarm large enough to power an electric train that would have to continuously carry millions of people? Only let people commute downhill?
As for the budget projection, I'd refer you to the success (or lack thereof) of the "Big Dig" in Massachusetts. Or any government "budget." I'd also be wary a
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
how can people like you continue to pop up after we beat the shit out of you every time?
here's a hint... the OLPC is not for the dying children with flies on their faces ok
get a fucking clue asshole, you're subverting everyone's efforts to make the world better
Re:Can one develop software on the XO? (Score:5, Interesting)
In many places they have water and they used to have farms. Then the US (and other countries) dumped produce on their market below the true cost (subsidized) such that local farmers could not compete. So the local farmers were undercut, couldn't pay their taxes and are now unemployed and homeless. It isn't that they don't know how to farm. It is that they can't make enough money farming to get by. They might be able to compete despite the unfair price of imported food if they could use modern practices, but they don't have the industrial infrastructure needed to make the heavy equipment and fertilizers and irrigation systems and they don't have the capital to buy it. The money needed to fund such a project would be way, way, way more than what is spent on the OLPC project.
Truthfully, there really isn't a better industry than intellectual property creation for high returns on low initial investment. This doesn't necessarily mean programming (in Python not C, since that is what ships with OLPC). Heck, people in some parts of the world could probably make a living with a XO laptop just by solving captchas. Then there is writing, video and audio creation, etc.
The point of the OLPC project is not to just supply what is most needed today, but rather to augment the charity food, water, shelter, and medical care with the tools of education (for any subject) and with the cheapest possible way for them to create a sustainable industry that will allow their society to stop relying on charity and start building again.
P.S. did you know Remote Area Medical, a charity that provides medical care primarily to Africa and east Asia has recently had to start working in the United States because so many Americans cannot get or afford basic medical care? Maybe the US should stop teaching computer science and focus on teaching medicine to more people?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fixed.
Why not teach the students who already have some infrastructure, how to develop more. It would perhaps be possible to have some sort of low-cost, sturdy computing device, introduced into the educational system, to assist in this effort.
comming up next on slashdot.. (Score:2, Insightful)
OLPC - kids education
Classmate - older kids education
Eee - web browsing and IM
Re: (Score:2)
RM, who have had a pretty strong hold on the UK education market since the demise of Acorn, are pushing Eee. [rm.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Its a simple education toy that only looks like a laptop. Its more of a specialized educational gadget like a speak and spell than a Dell. Its keyboard is tiny and only for little kid fingers. Its slow and has a very simplified interface. It cant do WPA and has no ethernet port. Its screen is like a very cheap version of e-ink.
I dont see
I own two of these... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
With an XO and having played with a ClassMate... (Score:5, Informative)
In return, it is not as rugged (cooling fan and open interior, LiIon batteries, electrolytics, conventional hinge, clunky insecure closure, thick), nor as cheap, nor as useful (sunlight readable display), nor as appropriate for the 3rd world (a >50W power supply!?!).
Also, Windows doesn't understand how to use the Classmate's screen, either having it scroll up and down or squashing the display to fit.
I'd want Windows on the XO, with Windows understanding the screen resolution. THAT would be a nice combination, as Sugar is an abomination all to itself.
Re:With an XO and having played with a ClassMate.. (Score:2, Funny)
Posting from my EEE PC... (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh wait, this is about educational use?? Uh... yeah I take my EEE PC to meetings and if I had this during college I'd have loved it for note taking. It's a sound educational tool that works great with my campus's wired and wireless access points.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Article is worthless (Score:5, Informative)
The eee certainly is stylish. I really like the hardware hacking you can do with it. I don't like the screen, though--not that it is too small physically, but that the resolution is so low, that text on the screen has to be larger in order to read it, which makes the screen effectively too small. Does that make sense?
My OLPC I really like, though again nothing is perfect. The hardware is top notch (though I have read of keyboard failures, that could happen to any manufacturer). The screen is great, I can read it in bright sunlight, I can flip it around and use it as an "ebook reader"--mostly to read pdf documentation for other software I use. I don't need to read that in direct sunlight, though.
One can't really complain about keyboards designed for children, but both the OLPC's keyboard and the eee (designed for adults) are about the same physical size, which means I can't touch type on either, but the fact that the keys are physically smaller on the OLPC, with a large gap between keys makes the occasional two-key press on the OLPC much less frequent than an eee.
One thing I really HATE, though, about the OLPC is that crappy sugarUI, and the whole activity vs. application paradigm. I also can't stand that file system hierarchies are ignored, and everything is collapsed to a single flat directory. How do I then save things to the correct subdirectory on my usb drive?
There are guides available to boot OLPC into ubuntu, for instance, but so far I've been too lazy to do so, especially since I have other options as far as hardware goes.
Classmate? meh, don't know, don't care. The few online reviews I have seen have not been flattering. The one plus, it doesn't have the sugarUI. The downside? Windows.
My wishlist for an UMPC would be: an OLPC, only slightly wider so it can acomodate a keyboard just large enough for me to touch-type, with ubuntu preloaded. If they make the next-gen eee an inch or so wider for the same reason, only with a decent screen (even if it is not as good as OLPC's) then I would settle for that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When I got to play with an OLPC, the thing that I couldnt' get past was the quality of the keyboard. It's nearly impossible to use for normal tasks; the keys are like soft telephone buttons and require a press rather than a tap. I would hate to use it for any kind of typing or development. Another poster mentioned that you can ssh into it to install software which really seems like the optimal choice. Of course, the SugarUI really isn't d
Economically it's a 4-5 year old laptop (Score:4, Insightful)
And for what it's worth, GAMERZ D00DZ at
I've used the EeePC & OLPC (Score:5, Interesting)
I, for one, *LIKE* the Sugar UI (Score:5, Insightful)
I have watched several children play around with my XO, and not once has any of them ever asked me how to start or stop an activity using the Sugar UI. Truly, it is a brilliantly simple interface.
Frankly, the Journal is one of the very best parts of the whole thing. The XO remembers everything you do, automatically. You don't have to hit "save" when you've finished writing something, or deal with "files" and "folders" -- kids have no concept of such abstractions. You just use the durn thing, and it records everything for you, silently and efficiently. When you want to go back to what you were doing, you go to your Journal, and bingo, there it is. One click, and you're back in the saddle.
The key point here is to remember that Sugar is for kids. If you want an adult interface, you can install XFCE or your adult-sized distro of choice. Since it's just a standard Linux box, it's really easy to explore.
Re:Bias? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Eee PC's 9 inch version.
Re:Bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bias? (Score:5, Informative)
The OLPC's resolution is given in what would be termed "subpixels" on a traditional display. So in one sense, an 800x600 RGB-stripe LCD of the same size would actually have a higher resolution: 1.44 million fixed-chroma/variable-intensity picture elements, vs. 1.08 million for the OLPC screen.
Parent
Re:Bias? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
OPLC isn't chroma fixed. (Score:3, Informative)
OLPC's screen isn't chroma fixed.
The other screens give you either 800x600 color pixels or 2400x600 subpixel with ugly color smearing on the antialasied edge (I just can't stand subpixel rendering. I find the color effects ugly) and non-square pixels (of course, each subpixels is a vertical rectangle wide 1/3 of its height).
OLPC's screen is either approx. 600x450 color pixels (in transflective mode).
Or 1200x9
Re: (Score:2)
Well, okay. But not screens.
Re:Bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
Add to that approximately three times the resolution (1200x900 vs 800x480) and it becomes pretty obvious that the OLPC has a much less cramped screen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bias? (Score:5, Informative)
That's not so trivial.
Parent
Re:Bias? (Score:4, Informative)
I've tried Sugar (on a PC, LiveCD), and it's designed for small display. The icons are big, spaced wide apart, there are no very small elements of the UI at all, the windowless interface always gives whole screen real estate to the currently running application, you never find yourself struggling to decipher some tiny text or click some small piece of UI. It manages the available space well and provides a very good middle ground between number of items visible on the screen at any time and depth of user interface trees.
OTOH WinXP is barely capable of running at 800x600 and not one dialog window will simply not fit on the screen. Switch your XP desktop to 800x600 and try playing with it for a few hours, I assure you you'll feel the screen is cramped and the interface clunky and uncomfortable. Lots of scrolling, lots of opening additional submenus, moving windows, blindly pressing enter in hope it accepts the "OK" of a dialog that didn't fit on the screen and isn't resizable - I did use XP in 800x600 for a while and it does feel cramped.
Parent
Re:eee (Score:4, Informative)
The 7 inch screens are a commodity (think portable DVD player) and as such are cheapish to produce. A 9 inch screen (the next logical step up in my mind), are more expensive now, likely because their demand is lower. I'm sure they could offer a larger screen, but at a much much higher cost, one that wouldn't compete well with the $500 low-end notebooks.
Parent
Re:eee (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:eee (Score:4, Informative)
9 inch screen and more RAM and storage for 100 Euros more ($150 US).
399 Euro's equates to $600 at today's rates. Like I said, you can get a low-end full-size notebook (with the Vista tax even) for that price or less. The only thing you lose with the full size, well, is the compact and easy to carry size. Battery life might be better with the Eee, though that is hard to compare without specifics.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:eee (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The screen won't magically become bigger if you remove the speakers. It would require selecting a larger LCD, and that means it would cost more. At the very least, it would cost more to add a larger screen than you would save by removing the speakers. You would then have to issue headphones with each OLPC, and probably have to replace them as they are lost/damaged/stolen.
The target audience isn't the average
Re: (Score:2)
If it weren't for those, the screen could be an inch bigger.
/. geek.
The screen won't magically become bigger if you remove the speakers. It would require selecting a larger LCD, and that means it would cost more. At the very least, it would cost more to add a larger screen than you would save by removing the speakers. You would then have to issue headphones with each OLPC, and probably have to replace them as they are lost/damaged/stolen.
The target audience isn't the average
He's actually talking about the Eeepc, not the OLPC. Yes, it would cost more for the bigger screen, but no, Asus would not have to provide headphones, and certainly wouldn't have to replace them after they're lost/damaged/stolen.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)