Last week Quanta Computers began mass production of the XO laptops by the OLPC project. Today a representative from Quanta appeared in our LUG here in Taipei. He gave a presentation on the laptop and left one for us. I played with it for about 30 minutes.

I have to say I left disappointed, mostly because the laptop is dog slow.

From hitting the power button till the moment when 'init' starts (at this moment one can actually see the message 'booting Fedora') : 27 seconds
from there till the moment when 'X' starts it takes another 25 seconds.
from X till apperance of the Sugar environment: another circa 30 seconds.

So, the whole booting sequence takes about 82 seconds. Launching a simple calculator takes at least 5 seconds. The 'Paint' application - 10 seconds or more.

At one point moving a window around with the mouse (a crude touchpad, actually) made this little thing come to a grinding halt. I thought it froze. It didn't even refresh the screen so for about 2-3 seconds I could see two mouse pointers. Finally after long 10 seconds it stopped thrashing and refreshed the screen. All that when I had only two applications open! Calculator and Paint, two simplest ones!

Moreover, Sugar is mighty weird. I dont know, maybe a child can make sense of it, but I couldn't. Applications pop up fullscreen and sometimes there's no apparent way to close them. Whole environment seems clumsy and unpolished.

The keyboard simply sucks. Feels like a cheap toy.

Overall, big disappointment. If you're thinking about the 'Get 1, Give 1' initiative then do it for the 'Give' part, and forget about the 'Get'.