This is my first post from my OLPC. Kind of. I actually wrote up an article earlier in a little bit of haste and was overly critical of a lot of things and so this post is half edit / half addition to that.
Saturday morning, when I finally woke up, I was siked to see hear that I had a package downstairs for me. All the emails that I had received about the OLPC said that I would I would get an email with the tracking number of my package when it shipped and so I was quite disappointed when it was a few days before my trip, and I still hadn’t heard anything.
But there it was, in was! Just in time!
I was convinced that the smaller keyboard wouldn’t bother me, since I was so used to pecking away on my Treo, so I was pretty surprised when I first tried to use it and had to resort 1/2 the time to the ‘hunt and peck’ method. After hacking around on it for a little bit here and there this weekend though, its not so bad. Sometimes it is difficult to hit all the keys on the membrain keyboard, often requiring you to press the key several times before the stroke takes (especially on the larger keys like the spacebar and back-space key), but we’ll see if that passes with time as well. And while we’re on the note of bashing the keyboard. It is most definitely cramped, some keys are missing (caplocks), and a few keys are in different places (I keep hitting the up arrow when I reach for the right shift key), but all and all, its pretty usable.
I had also read somewhere that the OLPC also didn’t come with support for WPA wireless signals which I was frustrated by, but I seemed to be able to join my wireless router with no troubles at all from the network screen.
So at first glace, I was unimpressed to say the least, but after using it for a short while, it definitely seems like it will be worth the money spent. I’d also say that I am most definitely not using this laptop for what it was designed for, and I really don’t see either of these issues being a problem for the intended audiance , and so I’d say the developers of the OLPC should feel as though they did a good job!