One year ago, Nicholas Negroponte started tossing XO laptops in meetings and presentations to prove its ruggedness. Now others are replicating his stunt. Just check out T.K. Kang, Clinical Psychologist and CEO of The Nurturing Education (TyNE) as he tosses an XO in Hong Kong:
Oh and less you think T.K. Kang did that just once, think again. He says "I dropped the XO 3 times to prove a point and have to do this again for the camera". So yes, the XO laptop has amazing durability. Its almost unbreakable. Just don't give it a keyboard water test.
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XOX. Lets hope the XO can fulfill its mission and become the critical "little finger" of a new generation - like in this man below - he fed his whole family from mastering the art & science of poking coconuts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6QKFMkX5k
BTW .. Don't try the flying XO on a concrete floor!! Choose your platform!!
Hola!
If another laptop just had 1 MB of flash ROM, wouldn't it practically do the same thing?
Today, SD card memory is so cheap that it could boot off a 8 GB card for $19 using a Linux OS.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0018BOLIC/ref=sr_1_olp_11?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1264096692&sr=1-11&condition=new
GregYohn, many of us have been using Linux Operating systems on the XO for quite some time.
I personally use Xtra Ordinary and the XO as my carry along laptop: http://webpath.net/xo
The OLPC News Forum has an entire category dedicated to using Linux on the XO: http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?board=68.0
In my post, I was saying another laptop would not be damaged by dropping it, if it used flash memory, instead of a hard drive!
Linux is on my XO using a SD memory card, but other laptops without a hard drive could also survive being dropped.
The bigger deal about the XO is that it uses a small amount of energy and its screen can be seen in direct sunlight!
These little machines are indeed incredibly hard to damage without getting out power equipment or submerging it the bath tub.
My kids drop it all the time, and I suspect that it was well known that most XOs would be dropped several times during their life span.
Just the other day my son was playing games on it ( http://webpath.net/index.php?itemid=11 ) and the next thing I know there is this noise of something falling down the stairs....you guessed it, the XO.
He bounded down stairs, picked it up, and continued playing his game without skipping a beat.
I would really worry about letting my 5 and 6 year olds run around the house with any other laptop/netbook, but the XO is built tough to stand up to the rugged life it will face with child ownership.
I thought of it as the best way to show how rugged this machine is and it worked all of the times, but one day while I was presenting XO to about 30 lady teachers in a school, I dropped it saying "you can't break it by dropping it from a meter high" and then I see all the teachers smiling (some of them laughing).
Ah, I had broken the screen.
Well, that laptop was tossed to the ground more than a hundred times.
Even at twice the price ($150), the OLPC XO-3 seems like a great deal. Maybe the company should price them at $150 or so over here so that children in third-world countries can get them for just $75. The Apple name and reputation are worth paying for to some degree but there also should be a huge market for a low-price, low-end tablet like the XO-3.