SANTA CRUZ, Calif., 29 January 2008 — Little, cheap and sturdy, laptops designed to bring technology to the children of developing countries are rolling out after years of promises. But don’t expect them to do much for high-tech kids in the US.
This winter I handed one — Intel Corp.’s Classmate PC — to my 14-year-old son, a high school freshman who has been pestering us for a computer to use at school.
“It’s cute,” he said. “Kind of dinky. I’ll do my work on this, but can I also play some games?”
Meanwhile, my sister and her husband in Seattle bought their children an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, telling their 10-year-old daughter Rebecca to “have fun, figure out how this works, and teach the rest of us.”
Rebecca was thrilled, but then she usually is when you hand her anything challenging.
Within a few weeks, however, both computers were barely being used, benched, as it were, by lackluster performance and frustrating bugs. The problems were bad enough to turn off our kids.
Admittedly, it might be a different story if our children — like those in developing countries — were not already familiar with high-end laptops, ubiquitous Wi-Fi and YouTube.
Still, it’s hard to imagine how the problems we encountered would not eventually pose an obstacle regardless of locale or expectations.
The Classmate PC and the OLPC are, at this point, the leading players in the emerging market of rugged, low-cost laptops designed to bring a new educational opportunity to children without access to technology. Analysts at Gartner say more than 6 million of the ultra low-cost PCs will ship by 2012, although there are fewer than 100,000 circulating so far.
Neither the Classmate PC nor the OLPC are currently for sale in the US. For six months Intel and the OLPC Foundation were actually partners, but in early January Intel quit the OLPC board, citing disagreements.
And although there are some similarities — both are about half the size of a 17-inch laptop, and both aim to improve poor children’s lives — there are some fundamental differences: The OLPC is a tutor unto itself, designed to educate a child who may not have access to a classroom or a teacher; the Classmate PC, on the other hand, comes with educational software and systems to be used in classrooms as a learning assistant.
One Laptop Per Child is a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte, former Media Lab director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original concept was to offer a “$100 laptop,” but prices have crept up on the green-and-white low-power “XO” computer, now selling for closer to $200.
My sister and her husband actually bought theirs for $400, but it was part of a deal offered during a six-week window last year that allowed them to keep one and donate a second to a child in a developing country.
“People spend more than that on an expensive toy for their kids, and from the reviews we read this was a real computer that actually worked well,” said my sister, Karen Snyder.
The OLPC runs on the Linux operating system and a chip made by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The software was complicated and buggy. For weeks neither my brilliant niece, nor her well-educated parents, could figure out how to get it to connect online.
They eventually had to reconfigure and upgrade the operating system, a complex process certainly not doable by a computer rookie. Pity the child in a remote Cambodian village trying to figure out this instruction from the OLPC website: “At your root prompt, type: olpc-update (build-no) where (build-no) is the name of the build you would like.”
Even worse, in order to save trees, the OLPC arrived with very few printed instructions. Instead the users were directed to a website for help, which would have been an insurmountable challenge if this was their only computer.
Once upgraded, the OLPC has been remarkably slow, often requiring repeated attempts to log in and balking at the notion of opening more than a few programs at a time.
“I am not sure how useful this is when there are other computers available in our home. But in a Third-World setting, where it is not being used to hook up to the Internet but to other XO computers, it might be more useful,” said my brother-in-law, Bob Sokol.
My niece Rebecca is defensive about her “cute” computer: “It has really fun games and it’s easy to carry around and its fun to figure things out on it,” she says.
This week she is trying to write a personal immigration story on it for a class assignment, and she says she is especially pleased with the “small keyboard with really squishy keys that are fun to type on.” The battery, she notes, lasts all day, but she’s having trouble printing the paper.
While Rebecca was gaining some affinity for her OLPC, my son Raymond was getting to know the Classmate PC, which run $230 to $300. The rugged blue cover proved to be tough enough for the daily bike commute to school. The magnetic snap, which I thought looked flimsy and therefore doomed, showed no sign of wear despite weeks of constant opening and closing.
The computer he tested operates at a moderate pace using a stripped-down version of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system. Raymond could stream short videos or play simple games as long as he didn’t have too many windows open.
But there were challenges. The small keyboard, which has a somewhat unusual configuration, was particularly hard to type on. He got halfway through an essay before switching to a larger computer, frustrated by his higher-than-usual number of typos.
He tried writing a history paper comparing two articles about ancient Rome, but found the computer couldn’t power up several websites and a word processor at the same time. For physics, he downloaded bridge-building software and was stymied by the undersized monitor. Geometry “is better done with a pencil and paper,” he said.
At school the Classmate PC was deemed “OK” for taking notes in class, but it took so long booting up that he either had to carry it open between classes or miss the first few minutes of a lecture. As for the cool factor, the Classmate PC was deemed “cute” by his friends but “terrible looking” by the kids on the school IT Team. Then again, he says, “those are the computer snobs.”
Raymond’s biggest problem with his Classmate PC was the power adapter, which slipped out very easily. But the battery lasted through a full day of school.
Raymond said he supported the idea of bringing computers to needy kids, but said a school might be better off with a dozen really good computers in a computer lab rather than mediocre computers for every child.
And at the end of the day, “it’s still better to have a really good teacher,” he said. “They’re a lot more important than computers.”
