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The iPodTouch Is What The OLPC XO Should Have Been

The iPodTouch is a mass-marketed device, so its cost has been driven down. An 8Gb device costs only $230.

Its development environment nearly demands performance. Its development language is Objective-C or C and only one app can be run at a time. Contrast that with Sugar on X11 on Python on C and an environment that exhausts available memory with very little effort.

Its touch screen encourages interaction. The XOs flakey keyboard and touchpad discourage it.

I still love the XO and OLPC’s mission. The only thing that they seem to have accomplished, though, is the proliferation of Netbooks across the commercial landscape.

This was written by Grant. Posted on Tuesday, July 7, 2009, at 9:53 am. Filed under Article. Tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

3 Comments

  1. Blaine K wrote:

    I agree and disagree – the CrunchPad (when available) is what the OLPC XO should have been.

    Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 3:03 pm | Permalink
  2. Patrick Stein wrote:

    I love the OLPC. What it has over the iPodTouch is ruggedness, mesh network, and a keyboard.

    That said, I plan on developing all my future kids’ apps on iPod and Android, etc.

    Friday, July 10, 2009 at 11:45 am | Permalink
  3. Grant wrote:

    I love the XO, too. They got the hardware right and the software wrong.

    Friday, July 10, 2009 at 11:52 am | Permalink

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