OLPC XO2: It’s all about the screen!
Have you seen these new renderings of the XO2? Again it appears that the iPhone continues to create a revolution in multi-touch devices and screen based input paradigms. This is a natural progression for the XO laptop program. Why? Well, the XO program is targeted to multiple countries, and I can imagine it is costly to build many customized versions of fixed keyboards for the current device. Additionally, a screen based keyboard allows complex input types of traditional chinese and japanese character sets which are difficult to express on a fixed keyboard.
Pixel QI (founded by original OLPC team member Mary Lou Jepsen) noted the following on their web site after the OLPC announcement:
Pixel Qi has a new take on the future of the computing – it’s not about the CPU or the OS – It is about the screen.
We contend that new displays, with integrated touchscreens, and wireless capability are the future. They are essentially motherboad-less and don’t need much an operating system at all. We are currently in a world of $10 CPUs, next year they will be less expensive. We see the future of the portable electronics as simply the display with embedded electronics eventually right in the display glass itself. This is the future laptop, the future cell phone and the future PDA. Instead of focusing on more and more Megahertz and Gigabytes, we focus on displays that we can read, as easy as paper – indoors and out – with battery life measured in days not hours. We are talking about displays that can also display HDTV quality movies.
Sounds ambitious, but then again some would have said this about the iPhone before it arrived and took the world of mobile devices by storm. Jobs was right when he said that the most important piece of iPhone technology was the screen. The multi-touch capability, high density / pixel count and on screen keyboards allow for much greater flexibility over traditional devices with fixed keyboards and standard low density displays.
