OLPC Laptop Goes on Sale in Europe
The “One Laptop Per Child” laptop (“XO-1″) is due to go on sale in Europe tomorrow, November 17:
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation is planning to sell the devices via online store Amazon’s European outlets from 17 November.
The machines will be sold under the Give One, Get One scheme that the OLPC organisation has already run in the US.
Under that scheme, buyers get one machine for themselves and the other is donated to a school child in a developing nation.
The OLPC laptop is a fabulous little device and I had a chance to play with it a little–both with its interior only at the OSL, as well as a full-blown device at Mozilla–and I really liked it.
Let’s see how it picks up during the holiday season. The article says, only 600.000 items were sold so far, less than the makers had hoped. But maybe Europe is just the market for it? Of course, at an expected price of about 300-something Euros, it has to compete with a lot of the new mini-notebooks on the market (Acer Aspire One and Asus EEE, for example), most of which are much more “beefy” than the small OLPC. Nonetheless, it’s a great “first computer” for the little ones — and since each bought one will give a child in a developing nation one too, the whole concept is very “Christmassy” indeed, so let’s see how it sells during the holiday season.
