Earlier this month, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte open sourced the hardware for the OLPC device, inviting manufacturers to use the technology developed for the device in their own laptops, and of course to build OLPCs themselves. Negroponte also believes the OLPC project can help make netbooks better. ZDNet talked to IDC, and they don’t think large OEMs will make use of OLPC’s offering.
Negroponte says there are three areas where OLPC technology can help improve netbooks. Low power computing (as in, lower than 2W), the ability to be repaired easily (ruggedness), as well as the screen technology to allow for reading in bright sunlight.
The goal behind open sourcing the design and making it available to others is so that they can start producing OLPC devices. IDC, however, doesn’t think this will take off all that much. They believe that while some white box vendors in the Asia-Pacific region may pick it up, the big OEMs won’t really dive into this – they are too focussed on netbooks.
ZDNet contacted HP, but they did not respond. They also contacted Dell, but they stated that the company does not believe in a “one-size-fits-all” approach, because user demand differs per region. Lenovo said it did not yet have enough information on OLPC’s offering in order to comment.
The OLPC project really kind of seems to be dying a very slow death. It gained some moderate success in Latin America, but in the Asia-Pacific and other regions demand is low, with those markets being served by netbooks instead. The OLPC project may simply have been a little too ambitious, but that doesn’t mean the project didn’t have a major impact: they kick-started the whole cheap laptop computing thing after all.
“Negroponte says there are three areas where OLPC technology can help improve netbooks. Low power computing (as in, lower than 2W), the ability to be repaired easily (ruggedness), as well as the screen technology to allow for reading in bright sunlight.”
Well, let’s see…
(1) Low power computing: it’s important for users to have an excellent battery life but they also want horsepower. Atom is going dual-core, VIA C7-M is being seen as dead-slow, people waits for the nVidia ION, and so on.
Even if they don’t really need more power, if they can have more power they’ll go for it. Like forever in the computer market…
And of course, while people wants an excellent battery life, they are not lost in a country with no easy-to-find power outlet. Basically you have one at the very least at home… Low power computing is not vital, it’s just a good thing.
Users needing the most battery life will certainly opt for additional batteries or for extended capacity batteries instead of choosing a lower power computing device.
(2) Ruggedness and easilly repaired: yeah users would love that but do you really expect for OEM to provide it?
They’d rather sell products that breaks in two years tops so you have all the best reasons to buy another product.
(3) Reading in bright sunlight: here is the only thing that could actually be used in actual products! A lot of people complains about it, moaning “hell why can’t I get the OLPC display in my netbook!!!”
But the marketing goes the other way. Better selling a coloured and bright display than a B&W sunlight readable. That’s much more appealling…
But who knows? We’ll see what comes out of it.
Edited 2009-03-02 17:05 UTC
Atom ain’t a speed demon either, it’s merely inorder cpu with 2 threads. It already requires dual core optimized sw to get remotely decent performance so will doubling that requirement make netbook people rejoice? Are they going to do serious rendering on netbooks?
Regarding 1) though…they do have few ideas that might prove useful, for example their battery tech which is supposedly marginally worse (energy density wise) than current Li-Ion but much safer. Also, they use a novel way to put to sleep even gfx controller when the only thing that’s displayed is a static image (though that might fall under 3)…)
And on a more general note…I believe performance comparable to the XO-1 might be enough, if the machine has thouroughly thought out software on it (if you think about it…upcoming ARM netbooks aren’t really that much faster than the XO probably, gaining most from video decoding hardware). BTW, that’s why I don’t understand software side of OLPC…why they didn’t create something based on Gnustep & Webkit (it should fly in comparison to their Python, GTK & Gecko stack…), for example?
Most people around me look only at the price when buying a laptop anyway…
VIA tried this too (VIA’s is wayyy beter) and didn’t really get any of the EOM’s all that interested (which is a shame since it really is a rather good platform). It was called the OpenBook platform ( http://www.viaopenbook.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&i… )
Yes, actually the OpenBook seems to be a really good platform.
But the question is about the VIA Nano. People do not want of the VIA C7-M and the VIA Nano is not really available for now. Furthermore the few “real” tests (understand: not from VIA) that have been done for now shows the VIA Nano as weaker than the Atom! :-O
However if the VIA Nano finally shows as a good performer (maybe the drivers aren’t ready yet?), the OpenBook could be a wonderful device with VIA Nano inside.
The problem however is that 6 months ago the VIA Nano could have taken a good market share if it were available and, again, if ti were a good competitor to the Atom in terms of horsepower. Good performance for lower power consumption plus video hardware decoding.
But today things are different: Intel upgrades its products. Both on the performance side with dual-core Atom and with higher clocks, and on the power-consumption side with better chipsets and with the older UMPC/MID chipsets (Z-series) that are now available for netbooks too. These better chipsets also allows for hardware decoding, also something on which the VIA platform looked promising.
Edited 2009-03-02 17:29 UTC
you might be suprised about the benchmarks (given these are not the most recent, but then again no one has benchmarket the “most” recent Nano against the Atom)
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTUzNSw0LCxoZW50aHVz…
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1540/10/intel_atom_vs_via_nano_pl…
i skippted to the conclusion on both of these.
I already saw this benchmark and it is not really interesting for the current discussion here because basically there is several Nano version, and the version used in this test is not to be used in netbooks. Which explains easilly why it beats easilly the Atom, by consuming much more power…
I was speaking of this test, which shows, until more tests comes out, that the Nano is worse than the Atom under 3DMark 2001:
http://www.newgadgets.de/2009/02/25/samsung-nc20-3dmark-2001-gegen-…
Bad drivers could explain all here, but as always one test or two is not enough. Let’s keep faith for now! 🙂
we just got our hands on the Nano E series (won’t be released to the public till june but the sampeling groups got ours in March). it smokes the current atom, even the 280.
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2008/1126/et02_22.jpg
At work we use PDAs extensively, Dell and HP, and the screens are completely unreadable in the daylight. It would be nice if we could somehow integrate the OLPC screen technology into our equipment.
Better yet, if someone would make stand-alone OLPC monitors that could be attached to our PDAs, or if the screens were downsized enough to actually replace the useless Dell/HP screens…
Edited 2009-03-02 18:28 UTC
In my opinion the end product just didnt meet too many of its targets (or perceived targets to be more accurate) the most obvious of course was on the price..
The OLPC lot have been canvassing every government they could to get them to signup, they have had some limited success. If I (as OEM Brand X) now build a duplicate system who will I sell it to? Its intended market (govs and NGOs) has already clearly said “no” to the product