Guest post by Richard Smith
We’ve finished testing power consumption while plugged into a 230V ac wall outlet for the XO-1 and the XO-1.5. The new machine performs well while suspended, and suspends very smoothly.  The 1.5 charges faster and using less power to charge the same battery. It also draws slightly more power when in high use, thanks to its variable CPU.
See the chart below, which includes the power draw of the AC adapter.  Battery-only numbers will be significantly lower, in particular for idle and suspend, but are a bit harder to measure cleanly.  There is no comparison chart for that yet.
Power draw at the wall (XO + adapter + backlight)
| Scenario | XO-1 | XO-1.5 |
| Full charge | 56 Wh | 47 Wh |
| Idle | 8.5W | 7.2W |
| High | 9.5W | 9.7W |
| Suspend | 5.2W | 2.85W |
Calculating low-power options:
A network of South Asian OLPC deployments (including India, Sri Lanka and Nepal) are working together to share knowledge and outreach. Support gang member Shirish Goyal has put together a gorgeous portal covering work in that part of the world, at olpcsouthasia.org
OLPC South Asia homepage
I felt a momentary pang of jealousy, looking at that design. But I satisfied myself with the knowledge that we will have a vibrant new look of our own soon, with the blog integrated into our main site. Here’s another sneak peek:
OLPC News
As a way to learn from our recent deployments in the Middle East, a new Arabic forum is being launched to foster discussion and share experiences in the field with our many partners and supporters! Like our many resources in English, Spanish, and other languages, the forum hopes to link interested players with regards to XOs and childhood education in the Arab-speaking world. On the forum please find XO manuals and guides in Arabic, links to regional XO groups, and opportunities to post questions and comments, as well as a chat forum!
We hope to expand our forums to include Hebrew resources as our project in the region continues to grow.
We invite all interested members of the XO community to join and contribute!
Rabi Karmacharya runs OLE Nepal, the local team in charge of implementing the current project in Nepal (with 2100 children and teachers at 26 schools). Today he posted an estimate of the total cost of their XO project — $77 per child per year. This includes network connectivity, school infrastruture, teacher training, repair, content creation, and administrative overhead for the project.
Rabi notes that many of these (connectivity, training, overhead) are fixed costs that go down with scale, and content creation is largely a one-time cost that they benefits all schools. And this project is still a pilot — less than 0.1% of the country’s primary school-age children. Other interesting details: their annual repair cost for the first year was just 2.5% – children and families are extremely careful with their laptops; something we have also observed in other Asian countries.
It’s tremendously useful to see this level of detail in shared data and experiences; thanks to the team for publishing it! They also publish an amazing country coverage map showing every school taking part in the project, with data about each one.
I hope to also see more of this school-level sharing of data and experiences, from environment and power considerations, to usage rates and general feedback, to published creative work of the students!
East African freelancer Nick Wadhams and Czech journalist Tomas Lindner (from Respekt) both visited Kagugu Primary School in Kigali this month, while in the country covering the recent presidential elections.
Wadhams reported briefly on his visit to Kagugu for a short radio segment for NPR’s All Things Considered.  He gets soundbites from a student and the project coordinator,  and notes some of the worries teachers and parents have.  He finds a classroom dark and dirty, and asks somewhat glibly “do poor kids really need laptops?”
Meanwhile Lindner wrote a subtle review of Rwanda’s development as a technological nation, for the German magazine Tagesspiegel.  He visits Kagugu with this in mind, considering the place of technology in schools as part of Kagame’s national Vision 2020 plan.  He interviews school director Edward Nizeymana, and visits a biology class to see how they learn together with XOs.  They discuss the rapid growth of school attendance, changing motivations and long-term goals of the students, and the challenges teachers face adjusting to new technology and to English as a new language of instruction.  Nizeymana says, responding to questions about whether Rwanda should invest in this way in primary education:
“The critics say that the government should first invest in drinking water or electricity.  But that will not do.  The world is not waiting… we have to run, do many things simultaneously. We can not let modern technologies wait until everyone has clean water at home. “