Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

After my trusty iBook’s motherboard died for the last, un-practically-fixable time, I thought I might try getting an ultraportable — after all, I reasoned, I pretty much just want to use a laptop for Firefox and ssh so I can work from friends’ houses, coffee shops, heck, even my couch once in a while. I don’t want to store a lot of stuff on my laptop; it’s more important that it be easier to carry around.

So I ordered an XO (you know! for kids!), fascinated by its charitable side effects and hipness factor, and figuring — I’m a small person! I want a small laptop!

It’s too small. It’s just slightly too small to be usable in every dimension — screen, keyboard, RAM, hard drive… I know, it’s for kids with small fingers and small computing needs, and my (relatively) small fingers and (relatively) small computing needs are small relative to those of adult first-world programmers. So I wasn’t too surprised or disappointed to discover that this laptop wouldn’t work out for my purposes (or when it took months longer than initially promised to arrive — they’re a charitable organization, after all, not a business). But I still don’t understand why, especially after they realized that they could profit from first-world demand for a thing like this, the OLPC folks weren’t interested in building a slightly modified version usable by adults. I’d think that the adults in the villages where these are being distributed would be interested in exploring them too, and that the kids’ fingers will get bigger pretty quickly and outgrow the tiny keyboard.

Still, it’s a pretty cool device, with a lot of innovative features — for kids. I hope the kid who got my laptop’s sister through the G1G1 program is enjoying it and learning from it!