quanta
Computers
OLPC Origins: US and Taiwan’s Hardware Lovechild
2:30AM Wilson Rothman | digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/hardware/OLPC_Origins_US_and_Taiwan_s_Hardware_Lovechild'; In November of 2005, Nicholas Negroponte and his OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen travelled to Tunisia for the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society, where they were able to present a “working” US$100 laptop concept to Kofi Annan, UN secretary general. No longer did the machine rely on that pop-up rear-projection display; it was smaller, made of green plastic, and had a crank for the kids to work—for 10 straight minutes per hour of use—when they had no other access to electricity. It was a vast improvement over that January’s pup-tent rear-projection laptop, hampered only by the fact that it was an absolute fake.
Computers
Secret Origin of the OLPC: Genius, Hubris and the Birth of the Netbook
2:00AM Wilson Rothman | From the moment Nicholas Negroponte showed off his US$100 laptop concept at the Davos world economic summit in January 2005, it was as if the tech world’s supermoguls were glowering down on him in judgment. Over the course of the year, Craig Barrett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weighed in, privately declining support and in some cases publicly disparaging the idea. The naysayers had a point. The mockup Negroponte was toting around that winter was one ugly baby. It aimed to reach the US$100 price tag by having a slower processor, a skinnier internal drive, a smaller body and let’s not forget that tent-like rear-projection screen that made it look like the conceptual heir to the pop-top VW Vanagon camper. But after three and a half years, Negroponte’s crazy idea hasn’t only produced the XO, a real laptop co-developed and manufactured by the world’s largest notebook maker, it’s also become a product most of Negroponte’s opponents are now copying. After interviewing Negroponte himself, along with his original CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, designer Yves Behar, advanced technologies VP Michail Bletsas and others, we can explain how this proposed global humanitarian effort may in fact be more successful as a revolution in hardware design, and how OLPC will continue to influence the hardware you buy, even if you never score an actual XO. More »
Phones
Dell Launching (iPhone Killer?) Smartphone Early Next Year
3:40AM Matt Buchanan | In an already interesting article chronicling the last 10 months of the second coming of Michael Dell at his namesake, Forbes mentions two more interesting upcoming products: A suicide chip for stolen laptops that remotely nukes the hard drive, and a smartphone co-produced with Quanta–led on Dell’s end by one of the RAZR’s daddies, Ron Garriques–that has “video, an MP3 player and Internet access and [will] be unleashed on the world early next year”. It’s a little off the initial release projection–nowish–but Forbes’ tidbit indicates the rumoured project’s still alive and in the oven. Obviously, it remains mostly a blank slate of speculation–what’s the OS going to be? Still WinMo6 or will Dell mix it up? Will it have a touchscreen, QWERTY or both? The list goes on. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a certifiable test of the new design chops Michael Dell’s been pushing so hard, which we hope are up to the task since there’s nothing worse than a poorly designed smartphone. What do you think should go into a Dell smartphone? [Forbes] More »
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