2nd Generation "$100 Laptop" Will Be an E-Book Reader

waderoush writes "At a conference sponsored by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation this morning, OLPC founder unveiled the design for the foundation's second-generation laptop. It's actually not a laptop at all — it's a dual-screen e-book reader (we've got pictures). Negroponte said the foundation hopes that the cost of the new device, which is scheduled for production by 2010, can be kept to $75, in part by using low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players."

OS

[Spatial]

Maybe Microsoft can kindly provide the OS for that one too, for a mere 40% of the cost of the device.

Soo...

[bsDaemon]

OLPC's goals have gone from providing a platform that allows full intellectual expression and room from growth and development, to running XP so maybe kids and type a book report or something, to now merely being a way to passively consume printed media?

And last week I thought that this project couldn't get any farther from good.

Re:Fool me once, shame on you

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Really? Rage and contempt? Over a value priced computer aimed at educating kids who otherwise would never get to use ANY computer?

As has been pointed out repeatedly, "educating kids" is an utter impossibility when OLPC+Windows combination is involved. The term you are looking for is "indoctrination". It is so for many, many reasons mentioned already a million times here, not the least of them the lack of any useful free "educational" software for XP, never you mind the storage for it on the OLPC.

Using "ANY" computer, "education" does not make. If that was the case, a far more cost effective way then the OLPC would be to simply ship used throw-away computers that clog our city dumps here (some of them far more powerful then the OLPC will ever be) to Africa in bulk.

You are confusing granting haphazard access to some fraction of the Western commercial technology, which requires a (very expensive) ecosystem of other commercial technology to be useful and which will never be available at the prices those kids can afford, with "educating" them. This is a purely corporatist view of the world and if it were up to people like you, education in the West would consist of giving kids a brand-name calculator (with no instructions) and calling it a "mathematics and electronics course" and as the parent poster insightfully mentioned, "a cooking course" would consist of a bunch of McDonalds coupons, etc and so on.

And there is of course the wee little bit of the matter of active mis-representations Negroponte has engaged in over the years on behalf of the OLPC project, but I guess that is far too esoteric for you to grasp.

You should see a mental health practicioner and get your priorities in order. Your stupidity is clouding your view of reality.

In the light of the actual facts you should take your own advice on this.

Re:Soo...

[gad_zuki!]

Exactly. i played with an XO for the first time about three months ago and as I held it I thought "Why isnt this thing in the form factor of an e-book?" So much real estate is wasted on trying to make it a general purpose computer. Kids, in real life, wont be hacking code 90% of the time, they'll be reading ebooks for their studies. This form factor is a lot smarter for how these students are actually going to use them.

Heck, Im still pissed there's no affordable e-book reader out there. I already have a couple of nice laptops and a nice desktop. I dont need another machine, but I would love a cheap (sub 150 dollar) e-book reader that accepted all sorts of formats and was easy on the eyes. I dont know why sony and amazon think the price point for these things is 300+ dollars. It 99 dollars or less. If the XO people do this it will be pretty revolutionary.

Re:Bye bye books

[xSauronx]

Textbooks are clearly a lucrative business, good luck getting enough people to care about the costs to overcome whatever lobby various publishers would put together to keep the status quo.

Re:Bye bye books

[digitalgiblet]

Hmm. Are you sure you want the government writing the textbooks?

Currently local governments (or at least state governments in some cases) SELECT the textbooks, but there are options. There isn't that much competition, but in this case ANY competition is a good thing. Government written and mandated textbooks sound pretty scary to me...

Re:Bye bye books

[Lumpy]

nope. it will never happen. Professors and their desire to rape the students by publishing slight revisions of their drivel year after year for insane prices are what keeps ebooks from being common.

If I could carry my entire semesters books in one reader I would be in heaven. All college students would love this.

Re:Power usage?

[Grisha]

Interesting, given that they aren't touch screens... So he makes an analogy to portable DVD player screens, then says they plan on using OLPC displays, and _then_ says they'll be touch screens.

So how can this possibly be had for $20 a screen? that's $20+OLPC Screen Cost + Touch Screen Cost = ???

He has some effed up math.

How about spending some time on the education part

[no_opinion]

New hardware is nice and all, but it's really of minor importance compared to the elements of the platform that should be there to help kids learn. I think there's a reason that the press never covers how fantastic and ground breaking the educational aspect is. The technology is interesting, but as far as I can tell, the educational aspect is an afterthought.

Re:Bye bye books

[Arterion]

Some students can't even pay for lunch. How are they supposed to pay for printing their books, too?

Re:Fool me once, shame on you

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude you seriously need to lay off that weed. You are getting paranoid.

Re:Bye bye books

[AmishElvis]

I'm not sure I like the idea of the government being the one to decide what my child learns in school. I know they do already to an extent with standardized tests, but actually letting government write the textbooks seems dangerous. It seems like it would lead to a lot of sugar coating of history. Also, I'm pretty sure we'd find "the cost of the paper" to be pretty expensive. Government is incapable of doing things cheaply.

Smart

[Yurka]

Well, that's certainly a way to deal with all those XO keyboards falling apart - not having a keyboard at all.

Re:Fool me once, shame on you

[mlwmohawk]

Your complaints and corrections would only shift things around, not change them.

The economic facts are against your argument. Assuming the market stays constant and additional competition does not increase the marketplace (as almost always happens), taking the gross and net income of Microsoft, and divide it across 6 companies, 3 OS companies roughly balanced between 25% and 30% market share, and 3 office product companies, again, 25% to 30% market share.

The six companies would employ more people and have a lower profitability. The lower profitability of the companies would mean that they spend more and cause more circulation in the economy and decentralize and distribute the wealth better.

More people with more wealth means a better economy.

With multiple companies competing, there would be competition, competition would mean actively supporting your competitors formats so that you can hope to take their users. Competition would mean standards that enabled the various vendors to interact, because they would have too.

Startup companies would have a much lower barrier to entry in entrenched markets.

That's what capitalism is all about and why a monopoly destroys it.

Re:Bye bye books

[CodeBuster]

The cost is not just in the writing but also in the peer review, editing, and re-checking of facts to ensure accuracy and completeness. That is why really good textbooks are relatively more expensive than their page count, material, and binding might suggest.

Re:Bye bye books

[mollymoo]

The form factor is that of a dual-screened eBook, but they have a popup touch-screen keyboard as an application.

Arrrgh! There was some future computing expo featured on /. a few weeks ago that was full of touchscreen keyboards as well. It's a horrible idea. There's no tactile feedback and no give to absorb the impact, so your fingertips will take much more of a beating than using a conventional keyboard. Touchscreen keyboards are fine for, say, typing a few numbers at a checkout, but for anything like serious input they're just an awful idea.

I never really understood why the OLPC project insists on reinventing the wheel. The mesh networking and screen were impressive tech, but why reinvent the computer desktop in the form of Sugar? Now they're going with an untried form factor. Just build a decent, inexpensive, robust laptop and ship the damn thing. I find it more than a little patronising that kids in less developed countries apparently can't be expected to use similar software to kids in the first world. When they grow up chances are they're gonna be using Windows, Gnome or KDE (or Aqua, if they're incredibly rich by local standards). They're all more like each other than they are like Sugar. I say start 'em young.

Re:Fool me once, shame on you

[mlwmohawk]

Spare me.
I don't think I can.

In 1980 the 5 MB Winchester hard disk drive would have set you back about $2000.

In 1970 a 5 MB RKO drive was about $10,000. And guess what, Windows wasn't needed for the price drop.

The Geek builds his Linux PC using commodity parts designed for the mass market Windows platform. Apple builds the Mac out of commodity parts designed for the Windows platform.

In 1978 I build my first computer out of commodity parts too, no Windows needed (or DOS for that matter.)

The concepts of commodity parts and rapidly accelerating technology development lowering prices is the nature of technology. I remember 256K DRAM chip prices sky high and falling fast, no Windows involved.

The fast track is the Windows implementation. The Windows driver.

Only because the caustic Microsoft monopoly. If there was competition, there would more standards in place and innovation would probably been even faster, or at least less wasteful.

opportunity

[zogger]

the entire project needs to be forked away from laptop.org, both hardware and software. Then it could just be an "anyone who wants one" little machine, like through a co-op for bulk hardware purchases. Most of the design specs are available and near as I can see the really expensive bits involve the display. which might be fixable. It needs to be reintroduced with the original idea of onboard power generation (or at least a foot pedal), and just use a low bloat normal linux distro for the software and dump sugar as reinventing the wheel..

Re:Bye bye books

[kesuki]

OLPC is basically a way to stick big bills to small countries for 'educational laptops'

in TFA OLPC 'complains' about how many countries thought they should have designed the whole thing around cellphone chipsets and displays (and inputs) to get even cheaper costs, and their argument is 'cellphones aren't laptops' typical imperialistic ideals...

all you need is something that can display informational text that should be able to be changed slightly each year, and for each region...

and possibly some way for the end user to take quizzes or tests on the material they read....

India wanted $10 laptops, and they made their own program, and i have no doubt they actually used small cheap processors like the ones in cell phones to make their project. they only got down to $50 last i heard, but still OLPC were $200 devices, and this one 'will be $75 in 2010' India expects their 'device' to be a lot cheaper by 2010. (though there is little known about the project in India, I assume they will try to use as much cheap cell phone tech as possible)

they also find the OLPC program to be suspect, why would you target grade school children in less developed countries to use expensive laptops that could be sold on the open market for three times the price paid by their countries for them as educational tools...

why teach children in poor countries on computers, when it's not even standard in developed nations? I definitely agree with India's problems with the OLPC project, consider the countries that have welcomed the project,

"Rwanda (G1G1 pilot)[42]
Americas
Haiti (G1G1 pilot)
Mexico (50,000 laptops bought by billionaire Carlos Slim)
Peru (270,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)[43]
United States of America (15,000 laptops bought by Birmingham, Alabama)[44]
Uruguay (100,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)[45]
Asia
Afghanistan (G1G1 pilot)
Cambodia (G1G1 pilot)
Mongolia (G1G1 pilot, now receiving 10,000 laptops"

Nigeria was going to order a million, but then elections were held and they haven't solidified the contract, Nigeria the number one source of Internet crime, was the most interested in OLPC.... bah, there is no reason for less developed nations to buy laptops to train kids, it's all a con to get those countries to go into debt to buy things that won't help their economies, that will do nothing but create a cast of children who want fancy electronic gadgets that they can never afford... unless they're as corrupt as Nigeria and create a class of criminals who focus on stealing as much as possible from developed nations...

if OLPC was serious about creating bare-bone education devices they would have modified cellphone style devices, instead of starting around a general purpose CPU with a complex operating system and complicated displays etc etc...

computers were originally designed around micro controllers for microwave ovens, basic text parsing and display is easy and cheap if you don't encumber the device with a fancy OS...

and for 'interactive textbooks' especially when you're targeting less developed countries, should focus on being as simple (and as cheap) as possible. OLPC isn't about bringing electronic textbooks to everyone, it's about making fancy electronic devices and teaching impressionable children to desire them...