OLPC President Reveals a Bit More about the XO-2

This afternoon I visited One Laptop Per Child’s headquarters in Cambridge to get an exclusive glimpse at its XO running Windows XP. My hands-on impressions of that system are coming soon along with videos of its boot time and the Microsoft OS on the green laptop.

But during my hands on time I had a nice chat with OLPC Chief Operating Officer Chuck Kane about the future of the program. The XO-2 - the dual touchscreen laptop that OLPC unveiled in May - was a point of conversation.

Some may be doubtful about the non-profit delivering the touchscreen laptop by 2010 but Kane is confident that the XO-2 will be ready by the start of the new decade. Though he couldn’t talk much about the development and the plans he said that an internal hardware team is working on it “as we speak.” Mary Lou Jepsen, formerly of OLPC and now with PixelQi, is working to develop the screen technology. Similarly, because the machine would be so software based the software development team is beginning to experiment with keyboards and the user interface.

In addition, we talked a bit about the size of the notebook. What is envisioned is a notebook that is half the size of the current XO; one that is more the size of a book than a mini-laptop. The picture above really displays how small they plan on making this device.

We are still dying to see a real live working unit (we have to wait until 2009 we are told) but until then we got some never been released pictures below. The webcam attached to the screen seems to be a pretty neat idea.