We’ve known about Pixel Qi technology for awhile, and it’s been steadily progressing to production. It’s basically a two-mode LCD: One for typical use, and one “reflexive” mode that requires much less energy and is easier on the eyes. Well, Josh Quittner over at Time actually got to check out a Pixel Qi display, and was awfully impressed.

He brands the colours about as vibrant as a typical LCD and said video “ran perfectly smoothly” (yes, Pixel Qi is capable of both colour and video). Jepsen claims battery life at around 40 hours of use, which isn’t quite up to the marathon-like endurance of the Kindle but is still impressively long. Best of all, Jepsen states that the Pixel Qi is ready for production now, at a relatively cheap price: Only about $US200 for a 10-inch screen. This might finally be the tech that brings e-readers up to their potential, so please, manufacturers, bring on the Pixel Qi e-readers! [Time]

The hippies philanthropists at OLPC are overhauling the guts of their XO-1 with the aim of keeping the portable’s battery life while increasing its capabilities.

The big news is the adoption of Via’s C7-M chip, with clock speeds between 400MHz and 1GHz, that’ll add new possibilities like HD decoding and surround sound. But that’s not the end of the upgrades.

XO-1’s memory should get a bump to 1GB, and its storage will get pushed to 4GB or even 8GB as an option. The upgrade, which is being referred to as the XO-1.5 rather than a totally new model, should start shipping in late August. [OLPC News]

Spotted at CeBIT, the device features double multi-touch touchscreens that are coupled with software allowing for virtual interface devices—like a resizable keyboard and trackpad—or the laptop can simply be rotated for eBooks that read more like real books.

Apparently this dual panel laptop is just a corporate-sponsored entrant into a design competition, so we may or may not see the device ever hit the market.

Wait, let me rephrase that: Pleeeease make this, Asus, pleeeeassseee. [Electricpig]

The news was delivered by OLPC frontman Nicholas Negroponte himself, during remarks at this week’s TED 2009 conference.

Blogger Ethan Zuckerman, reporting from TED, said Negroponte hopes the new open source hardware design will be “something that everyone copies.”

“Commercial markets will go to no end to stop you. It’s sort of a tragedy,” Negroponte said. “So the future of One Laptop Per Child is to go ‘from uppercase to lower case,’ to ‘build something that everyone copies.’”

According to Negroponte, the open design will lead to companies worldwide creating 5 to 6 million machines, per month, in three years time. That’s a lot of little mean green machines with those weird alien wifi antennas.

And while this technically sounds like more of a licensing deal than true “open source,” it will be interesting to see what companies cook up using the OLPC design over the next few years. If it catches on, that is. [Ethan Zuckerman via CNET]

The thing, as described by the Times of India:

A storage device containing megabytes of data info which can be accessed by a user by connecting this device to a laptop.

Oh. That description sounds an awful lot like a USB drive, observed through computer-illiterate eyes. However, the only picture available of the device shows a small white box with lots of attached cabling, indicating that there’s more happening here than simple storage. You know, something exciting, like networked storage! Either way, FAIL.

This whole fiasco was compounded by a few factors: deliberate misinformation by people close to the project, the complete and utter incompetence of the Indian tech press (we still don’t even have a solid idea what this thing is) and the condescending eagerness of Western news outlets to believe that such a product, which would have been dismissed as totally impossible if announced here, was inexplicably plausible because it was coming from the mysterious foreign land of India. Whatever the case, there is no $US10 laptop, and there probably never will be—at least not from this project. [Times of India, photo via ITCafe]

We know nothing new, save for the name. It’s called the Sakshat. It will cost $US20 at launch but is promised to drop to $US10 six months later. And it features 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi and ethernet while consuming just 2W of power…which we knew.

Screen size? Processor? Battery life? Software? Launch date? Pictures? Fuzzy pictures? Nah, that stuff is for real products. Right now, this is vapourware. No, it’s not even that. It’s some second grader sitting in the back of the bus, convincing his classmates that, really, his dad used to play basketball with Michael Jordan and that, seriously, he’s totally hooking up with a seventh grader over at Parkland Middle School. [InformationWeek]

The already beleaguered non-profit has been hit as hard as other charities during the economic crisis, says Negroponte, who said on the OLPC wiki:

Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people. While we are saddened by this development, we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries.

The downsizing gives Negroponte an opportunity to more clearly phase out software development on the Sugar Linux interface and platform, he says in order to focus on the double-screened XO2. It’s no secret that Negroponte was easing away from Sugar anyway, moving to Windows, so this presents a good excuse.

He also announced that they’d be spinning off the Latin America branch, a move that doesn’t exactly build confidence in the organisation overall. We certainly hope that Negroponte and his remaining team manages to pull that X02 together, but by the time they do, it may be just be a proof-of-concept. [Ars Technica]

Lennon’s soliloquy, a patchwork of Beatles allusions, catchphrases, old footage and digital additions, is distractingly strange to the point that it loses what little efficacy it could have had, at least for me. Thing is, I might not be a member of the target audience. When you consider who that audience might be, the ad makes quite a bit more sense.

Here’s the recipe:

1. A slightly esoteric and novel project, with which you can send cheap, rugged laptops to the developing world
2. Old, monied, formerly (proudly) altruistic baby boomers
3. Their greatest, deadest idol, muttering nonsense like he used to
4. Guilt!

Complain as I may about the ad, if it results in thousands of defiantly ponytailed fifty-somethings buying OLPCs for disadvantaged children, then well, who cares how goofy it is? [BBC]

I don’t think the OLPC folks are advocating doing the ol’ switcheroo–XO for AK-47–to eradicate such horrors as the ones depicted on the spot. No, I think the ad does a great job in reminding us that, hey, this project was started for a serious reason. It’s not OLPC’s fault that they spawned an entirely new laptop category with plenty of consumer frenzy and ridiculousness behind it in the process.

The ad is intended only for the internet. [OLPC Ad on Daily Motion via Laptop, Gadget Lab]