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:
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!
Sri Lanka’s Virtusa has been working with our support gang over the past six months to provide a team of testers to help improve test depth and quality for new Sugar releases. They have been working with both XO-1 and XO-1.5 machines, and are now testing our upcoming 10.2.0 release.
Update: Fast Company just picked up this story over the weekend. Thanks again to the Virtusa team!
India’s HRD Minister Kapil Sibal spoke recently of a $35 tablet for Indian students. In response, Nicholas published this open letter to India. (Read it also in Hindi, Spanish, French, and German.) Continue reading
David Leeming of OLPC Oceania has developed detailed deployment docs for a recent pilot in Kosrae, Micronesia, over at Wikieducator.   It is an excellent summary of what has been learned in the region to date, and useful guidance for anyone trying to organize a deployment for anywhere from 10 to 10,000 students.  I hope to see more great things from this project.
UPDATEÂ (Aug 20): David has published an excellent Teacher Training Manual based on those notes.