XO-3 news around the world

News about the Marvell partnership and accelerated XO-3 roadmap are hitting newswires in other languages (in French, in Spanish, in German); they tend to be confused about what will be available when at what cost.  Still, it’s fascinating to read some of the international views on what this means.

In English, there’s a discussion about the new design online:

Charbax: Marvell openly aims to fulfill OLPC’s design and pricing goal,
Wayan: OLPC will be working to sell Moby tablets,
mavrothal: How XO-1.5 will fare, if new big deployments materialize and what the data show can change everything,
sola: It is enough to customize a well-built reference design and port [Sugar] to ARM… sell the new XOs through every possible sales channel

And even Larry Dignan gets in on the chatter — saying that the real impact of the XO-3 will be to drive conversation about what tablets should do once they are omnipresent.

XO-3 update: OLPC and Marvell partner to design a line of tablets

XO-3 design by Yves Behar
XO-3 taking a photo

This post is now in French on the OLPC France blog – thanks, Lionel!

I’m happy to announce that today we finalized a partnership with Marvell to design a line of education-focused tablet computers. Some of these will be OLPC machines targeted for the developing world, such as the XO-3. The line will be based both on Marvell’s reference design for its Moby tablet and on OLPC’s XO-3 designs (particularly for the low-power end of the line).  (Hat-tip to Charbax for predicting this in March.)

Update: see also this video of Nicholas discussing our current tablet plans. (If you look closely, you can see that some of the highlights were from a talk in the new Media Lab building.)

The first tablets in the line will be based closely on the Moby, ”’not”’ the XO-3, and focused more on children in the developed world. They will be on display at CES 2011 in January, and available next year for under $100. The original XO-3 design is still planned for 2012.  More details after the jump.

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XO-3 concept design is here!

Update: thanks for all of the feedback on the design!  There has been some discussion about materials, and a few interesting pieces have passed around the office, but no new eye-candy is forthcoming for a while — we’re busy getting the 1.5 out the door.

The XO-3: it’s designed to be thin, sleek, and touch, while continuing to lower power, cost, and material waste.  We’ve been anticipating the new designs for a while, and now they’ve arrived!  As announced in Tuesday’s  press release, after our upcoming releases of our 1.5 and 1.75 models next year, we are looking at the XO-3, a thin touchscreen tablet, for 2012.  Here are the latest images from the Fuse design team:

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XO roadmap updates: XO 1.5, 1.75, and 3

Today we announced our coming hardware lineup, the pending production of the XO 1.5, and published the first concept photos and timeline for the XO-3 tablet.  Here’s the press release:

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD DRIVES BREAKTHROUGH ADVANCES IN REVOLUTIONARY XO CHILDREN’S LAPTOP Product Road Map to Deliver Unprecedented High Performance, Low Power Consumption and Design Innovation at Lower and Lower Cost

Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 2009 – One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, announced today its product road map to deliver robust laptop performance and innovative design for use in the most remote, poor and rural communities and at the lowest power and cost in the industry.

“The first version of OLPC’s child-centric laptop, the XO, is a revolution in low-cost, low-power computing. The XO has been distributed to more than 1.4 million children in 35 countries and in 25 languages,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. “To fulfill our mission of reaching 500 million children in all remote corners of the planet, OLPC will continue to innovate in design and performance. Because we are a non-profit, we hope that industry will copy us.”

The new versions of the XO laptop will be as follows:

• XO 1.5 – The XO 1.5 is the same industrial design as the XO 1.0. Based on a VIA processor (replacing AMD), it will provide 2x the speed, 4x DRAM memory and 4x FLASH memory. It will run both the Linux and Windows operating systems. XO 1.5 will be available in January 2010 at about $200 per unit. The actual price floats in accordance with spot markets, particularly for those of DRAM and FLASH.

• XO 1.75 – The XO 1.75, to be available in early 2011, will be essentially the same industrial design but rubber-bumpered on the outside and in the inside will be an 8.9”, touch-sensitive display. The XO 1.75 will be based on an ARM processor from Marvell that will enable 2x speed at 1/4 the power and is targeted at $150 or less. This ARM-based system will complement the x86-based XO 1.75, which will remain in production, giving deployments a choice of processor platform.”

• XO 3.0 – The XO 3.0 is a totally different approach, to be available in 2012 and at a target price well below $100. It will feature a new design using a single sheet of flexible plastic and will be unbreakable and without holes in it. The XO 3.0 will leapfrog the previously announced (May 2008) XO 2.0, a two-page approach that will not be continued. The inner workings of 3.0 will come from the more modest 1.75.

Let us know what you think!