At first I thought that I was looking at a late April's fool joke. Then I was reminded of other potentially faked material involving Microsoft and OLPC. But the more often I look at the photos that Gizmodo has posted the more I believe that I'm really looking at a limited edition XO-1 that comes in red:
More than clock-stopping hot!
"Wilson caught this limited edition Red OLPC at the company's headquarters near MIT's campus in Cambridge today. The limited edition run of 100 is made for developers working on the dual boot Sugar Linux and Windows XP system, and has specs identical to the regular OLPC, except 2GB flash memory--the minimum required for Windows."
Now the 2GB flash-memory certainly doesn't surprise me. In fact I think this might become the standard on the previously mentioned XO-1.5 which is supposed to become available in spring 2009.
However the red enclosure is a really nice touch, even though apparently someone messed up the order and forgot to get accompanying red power-adapters.
While this very much looks like a limited test and gizmodo mentions the red XOs not becoming available to the public I believe this could be the first small step towards customized XOs. I'm sure this will be appealing to some countries who might prefer to have different colors, RAM or Flash size requirements, etc. Up to now the XO-1s were very much "one size fits all" and with the new approach I'm sure we're going to see some slight variations appear further down the road.
Next stop: Laser-etching a message into your XO before you complete your G1G1 2008 order!
In the end the only thought racing through my head at the moment is: Me wants one!!! Oh, wait, there's a second one: Where's the XO in Intel-blue for Wayan?
Thanks to Christopher S. for the late Friday-night submission.
I'll pass on the red jacket and just go forward with my greenie. I will have a serving of the 2GB flash memory, thank you.
Hi.
The OLPC initiative must be very vibrant. I have been following this blog believing it to be the authoritative source of information I could use to help me participate in it. Your last post suggests that there may be other resources that specifically addresses my needs, I will be grateful if you could direct me to them? THank you.
I, for one, wouldn't mind getting my OLPC in different colors. A lot of people confuse it with a leapfrog when I first show it to them. Plus, it would be a good change of pace.
As for customization, I think that would be a great thing. I believe that it could possibly help make the OLPCs more attractive to people outside of this community and therefore get more people interested in participating with the G1G1 programs.
Anyways, thanks for the article. Gave me something short and sweet to read this morning.
Red looks nice. But my favorite color is green, so I'll stick with that. :)
I can envision schools wanting to place an order for XOs made in their school colors, though. School colors and even emblems will help make the laptops easily identified (and, not coincidentally, harder to steal and resell).
I'm curious about one thing, however, after reading that future XO models will have more memory. Is it physically possible to upgrade the flash memory in an XO-1? Or are we going to have to wait for someone to physically hack the machine and figure out how to increase the flash memory capacity? (Because I'm sure someone will -- we already had someone perform a keyboard transplant on their XO -- directions were posted a few months back on this site.)
Donna, the flash modules are soldered onto the motherboard so the internal capacity can't be upgraded.
You can just use vinyl dye ("paint" for plastic, rubber, etc) to colour most computer surfaces, such as the XO. I'm waiting for a bit of free time to shade my XO to a nice blue/grey scheme..
Of course the keyboard wouldn't be too functional, since it would recolour the entire surface including the lettering.
dax, your talk about vinyl dye brings back memories of those good old case-modding days... :-)
hey christopher, thanks for the heads up about the dealio with upgrading the internal flash
for 10 extra bonus points...any idea why they melted it into the motherboard like that? because while i can certainly see an advantage to knowing that the flash drive wont ever, ever fall out, it would still have been nice to have opened it up and popped a huge flash drive in there
Christoph: It's to prevent "chop shops" taking out the components and selling them.
Or it could be because it's cheaper to wave-solder all of the components to the motherboard at one time than to add a chip holder to the parts list and add the memory chip in a separate step.
The internal flash is soldered in for reliability.
If you want to upgrade the XO's flash storage, the right way to do it is to buy an SD or SDHC card and slip it into the slot under the right side of the screen. BUT: there are currently several bugs around the SD support -- if you suspend the laptop, it trashes the partition table! -- so it's a good idea to wait a while. Also, the longer you wait, the bigger an SD card you can get. SDHC cards run about $50 for 16 GB on newegg.com these days, or you can get an 8GB card for as little as $25.