Reading in bed.
Friday, December 21st, 2007
I’ve written about (without laying hands on) Amazon’s Kindle and of course I’ve been exploring with our new OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO, poking and prodding it through external connections, reconfiguring it so that it chats with the outside world correctly, calling up page after web page (“hmm, that looks quite readable and fine.”), but I didn’t draw any dots connecting the two. This O’Reilly Radar post does…it considers the OLPC as a reading machine (which, indeed, it is.) Purchasing the XO represents the same cash outlay (although the Get One, Give One program provides two machines—you keep one—for that price)…its screen is larger than the Kindle’s (had no idea), the OLPC has terrific wifi reception versus the Kindle’s ‘free’ EVDO cellular networking…and of course the XO will display web pages, feeds, PDFs, ebooks, pretty much everything you throw at it…and that’s where the Kindle steps aside.
Oh, and the XO’s screen has color (except in bright outdoor light) and more dots per inch.
And is all open source.
At any rate, I stayed up late reading last night on the XO, depleting its batteries for several hours. I’m worried that the clicking of the ‘page down’ key might be just a bit too loud for extensive in-bed reading next to a sleeping partner, but it worked well otherwise.
