Will the '$100 laptop' project ever be considered a success?
Education can be so easily taken for granted, especially when you consider that every child in the UK has access to a computer, whether it's at home, at school or in libraries.
But what most people forget is that one billion children in the developing world have little access to education and no access to computers, which is where a burgeoning non-profit organisation called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) comes in.
The organisation hit the headlines in 2007 when it developed a low-cost laptop called the XO, which was designed to be bought cheaply by governments of developing countries and distributed among school children.
The XO was originally dubbed 'the $100 laptop', and although three years on it still hasn't achieved its target price, it has been purchased by the governments of 21 developing countries and distributed to 1,284,500 children across the world.
However, while the organisation has helped many children, it has also courted controversy and created rifts with the world's biggest technology companies.
One Laptop Per Child was the realisation of an altruistic dream by MIT director and professor Nicholas Negroponte. In 2005, he unveiled his plan to see a laptop given to every child in the developing world.
The idea was based on the creation of something completely unique: a laptop durable enough to withstand the stresses and strains of life in a developing country, cope with the very real challenges of an intermittent power supply and internet availability, and cost just $100.
The design of the XO PC was outstanding, and should be regarded as a great feat of computer engineering.
Against the backdrop of the prices of technology in 2005, which was before low-cost and low-power components were prevalent, Negroponte designed a laptop with a 433MHz processor, 256MB RAM and a 7.5in LCD display and wireless networking for only $199.
This price was completely unheard of at the time, and the device had enough power to drive Sugar, its bespoke Linux operating system. It could function as a laptop and ebook reader, had a screen that was clearly visible outside in direct sunlight, had 12 hours of battery life and was completely shockproof, waterproof and dustproof.
While the XO preceded the market in terms of design, its biggest challenges were to overcome the rigours of a life in the hands of children in developing countries. Availability and reliance on power was a problem for Negroponte, and the XO could not succeed if it was too power-hungry.
OLPC also had to iron out the biggest failing point of consumer laptops: hard disk crashes. The XO introduced flash drives, which eliminated the mechanical wear and tear of traditional spinning disc drives.
What's more, the XO featured a revolutionary new screen that used a dynamic LED backlight, which reduced operating wattage down to 3W under normal conditions. This put battery life at 12 hours, far beyond that of normal consumer laptops, and made the XO a force to be reckoned with.
A new kind of PC
The XO laptop caused such a stir that it's credited with spearheading the netbook craze, which is still the only PC submarket that's actually growing. Once OLPC had mastered the low-power components, screen and size, it started selling the devices in the US.
The laptop was retailed as part of the Give One Get One campaign, where a US consumer purchased a laptop for $400, and donated one to a child in a developing country at the same time. It's this campagin that Wayan Vota, Editor of independent community OLPC News, believes caught the eye of companies such as Asus and Acer.
"The real threat of OLPC introducing a '$100 laptop' was enough to spur technology companies into action. And they had to act fast. OLPC sold 160,000 XO laptops at $400 for two – and you didn't even get both. That had Asus rightly excited when it launched the EeePC line to amazing success," he said.
Once Asus made a commercial success of its Eee PC, the whole market had to catch up – and within six months every laptop manufacturer was shipping a netbook.
In 2009, there were 33.3 million netbooks sold globally, and the sector achieved a 72 per cent growth in sales, while there was a 13 per cent decline in the amount of notebooks sold. If its supporters are correct, One Laptop Per Child caused one of the biggest technology sensations of the decade.
"The creation of the netbook market is largely, and appropriately, credited to OLPC," says Ed McNierney, Chief Technical Officer of OLPC. "We wouldn't have $300 netbooks in the consumer market if that push from OLPC hadn't happened.
"Consumer product companies in the technology world are not known, in general, for their risk-taking behaviour," he told PC Plus.
However, when asked for a comment, an Asus spokesman told PC Plus that the XO had no bearing or effect on the creation of the EeePC 701, and that the company would have come to market with a similar product even if the XO hadn't been invented.
Competition
It's not often that a non-profit organisation courts competition and controversy, but the technology industry can be an unpredictable world, and it wasn't long before OLPC found itself embroiled in a war of words with Intel.
The world's biggest chipmaker had seen the market potential of the developing world and built its own low-cost laptop, the Classmate PC, soon after the announcement of the OLPC XO – a move that incensed Negroponte.
He called Intel "predatory" in a lecture at MIT and accused the company of "hurting the [OLPC] mission" on the CBS news show 60 Minutes in 2007. If this wasn't enough, Negroponte then accused Intel of selling its Classmate PC to the same governments he was trying to persuade to take up orders of the XO at a loss-making sum, scuppering his project.
In the face of widespread criticism, Intel eventually joined forces with OLPC in December 2007. This uneasy alliance caused public consternation from AMD, a founding partner of the OLPC project.
While the Intel/OLPC partnership promised a new beginning, the reality was very different. Less than six months later, Negroponte dropped Intel representatives from OLPC's board of directors, demanding that Intel dump its Classmate project if the two companies were to continue to work together.
With the money Intel has invested in its own project, it was never going to can the Classmate PC, so the relationship came to an end.
Since 2007, both laptops have seen their share of success and failure, with Intel shipping one million Classmate PCs to Venezuela and 150,000 to Libya.
OLPC, meanwhile, has saturated Uruguay and Peru with approximately one million XO laptops and also completed smaller orders from Colombia, Rwanda and Mexico.
Whether Intel's Classmate PC project hurt the OLPC effort or not is still the subject of intense debate, but Vota doesn't think that was the case. He believes that the enthusiasm created by both the XO and the Classmate PC made Negroponte's dream a reality.
"I've heard from Intel insiders that the XO laptop moved the netbook revolution forward by a few years," he told PC Plus.
"Intel would've come out with a Classmate-like device, but not as soon as they had to with OLPC's pressure. For this, both organisations should be thankful because netbooks are the only bright spot in the laptop business."
However, the bright spot of technology might not look so good for OLPC. It's not been able to get its unit cost down to the desired $100, and orders have been far from overwhelming.
What's more, the consumer market has caught up, and it's possible to buy standard netbooks that cost as little as an XO. While they're not built quite as ruggedly, they do feature fully functional operating systems such as Windows, which some say would better prepare children for a connected future.
Despite its rocky road to success, OLPC still has a long way to go before it can claim any kind of success.
Its intention to deliver PCs into the hands of the world's poorest children is admirable, but experts have questioned its methods, warning that the charity risks wasting the hard work and achievements by equipping communities with laptops and then leaving them to work out how to use them for themselves.
This is a criticism that Walter de Brouwer, European CEO of One Laptop Per Child, flatly rejects. "The charge is false," he told PC Plus in an exclusive interview.
"Typically, teachers and schools receive a two-week introduction not only to the machine and its technical features and operation, but more critically on how to actually integrate it into the learning experiences," he said.
"OLPC works with the country to develop a team that works with the schools," De Brouwer continued. "The team supports the schools, technically and pedagogically. This team also works to develop capacity at the schools, but also locally out in the communities."
In the UK, schools require entire departments to keep their networks and PCs in running order, and the use of IT in classrooms is a key part of teacher training. Even Vota, an outspoken supporter of the OLPC project, has questioned the level of support provided by OLPC, calling its deployment strategy "irresponsible".
"OLPC has always maintained distance from actual implementation, claiming it was the country's responsibility to integrate the XO laptop into their educational system. That might work for Uruguay, a stable, advanced country.
"But it's irresponsible in less-developed countries. OLPC has the responsibility to educate countries on what they are buying – an XO laptop should be one small part of a whole educational system change," he said.
"Just handing over the XO laptop like it's a self-installing app leads to [situations like] Ethiopian teachers banning them from classrooms as a plague on education."
Last year, teachers and parents in Ethiopia criticised the deployment of the XO, claiming that it was a distracting toy for the children and could not be a worthwhile tool in their education system, which is built around memorising from a blackboard and passing the national test.
Without training teachers to implement the laptops, the XO couldn't fulfil its function.
While self-learning is an important part of the XO's purpose, it's clear there's a serious risk that the laptops will either not be used effectively or fall into disrepair.
One has to admire what Negroponte and OLPC has achieved in the last three years, battling adversity that would have overcome many other organisations.
It's working on a new version of its laptop, the XO-1.5, which it hopes to start deploying later this year, and has released concepts of a $75 tablet PC that it aims to make a reality by 2012.
No-one can argue that getting an internet-connected laptop into the hands of children in the developing world isn't essential for those countries to grow and prosper. But unless OLPC asks difficult questions of the XO's recipients, it risks wasting an opportunity.
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Review: SeeSaw
For a website doing the Herculean task of competing against illegal filesharing, SeeSaw gets a lot of things right.
It offers a collection of TV shows from the BBC, Channel 4 and Five on a single website. Each video starts streaming quickly and is available in low, medium or high quality. Adverts play before each episode, but they tend to be short and few in number.
It's convenient and watchable in your lunch hour. Unfortunately, SeeSaw stumbles where it matters: the programmes.
While the site offers every episode of favourites like Spaced and Father Ted, and posts new episodes of series like The Gadget Show and Neighbours, it only features a portion of what's already available on respective content providers' services, like iPlayer and 4oD.
It's tough to imagine SeeSaw ever pulling ahead. Why would any channel provide episodes not already offered by their own services?
The best SeeSaw can hope for is to one day draw equal, and as if to underline that all its content is available elsewhere, Channel 4 programmes feature the 4oD logo in the corner. By being trapped in the shadow of its content providers, SeeSaw appears doomed to paucity.
The internet should provide a home to enormous vaults of past shows, but viewers remain stuck with a motley selection of Doctor Who episodes. There's a complete lack of the forgotten gems that such sites should be highlighting.
Yanks to the rescue?
That leaves American television as the one area where SeeSaw could potentially pull ahead. Hulu, the site's closest American equivalent, is no longer launching in the UK. 4oD offers only a few of Channel 4's licensed shows, and BlinkBox's US selection costs a steep £1.79 per episode.
Sadly, SeeSaw's current plans will see its US series disappear behind a paywall, meaning that unless it can pull off a content coup, the site will remain polished but inessential.
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Review: Asus ENGTX480
For a company that prides itself on showing the opposition how to do it, the past six months or so have been tough for Nvidia. Rival AMD was first to market last September with graphics chips supporting DirectX 11, Microsoft's latest multimedia API. Since then, Nvidia has been very much in second spot.
But that was then. The now is the arrival of Nvidia's fabled Fermi graphics chip. Rumours abound regarding its troubled conception. Some said it was down to failures by Nvidia's production partner, Taiwanese chip foundry TSMC; others pointed to deep flaws in Fermi's architecture. We'll probably never know the full details.
What we can say for sure is that Nvidia originally intended to release Fermi cards last year. The ensuing delay handed the advantage to AMD.
At launch, two graphics cards based on Fermi are available. The top board is the GeForce GTX 480, tested here in the shape of Asus' ENGTX480. The GTX 470, meanwhile, slots in below as a slightly cut-down second stringer.
With 480 stream shaders, the GTX 480 has twice the computational complexity of Nvidia's previous flagship GPU, the GeForce GTX 285. The GTX 470 loses another 32 shaders for a total of 448.
All hail the giant
If that sounds like a typically impressive increase from one generation to the next, it's not the whole story. The Fermi chip itself packs 512 shaders. Nvidia has fused off 32, no doubt in order to increase production yields on what is a tricky GPU to manufacture.
Weighing in at three billion transistors and spanning more than 500mm2, it's easily the largest and most complex computer chip ever to make its way into the PC. Not only does it dwarf AMD's Radeon HD 5800 series, it makes even the latest six-core CPUs look positively puny.
Along with the 480 shaders, the GTX 480 packs 60 texture address units, 60 texture filters and no fewer than 48 render output units. The latter is 50 per cent more than AMD's Radeon HD 5870. It also boasts a 384-bit memory bus and 1.5GB of graphics memory, again both 50 per cent better than its key rival.
Put the two together and you have an architecture optimised for operating at ultra-high resolution and detail settings – just what PC gaming enthusiasts want to hear.
Tessellators for the win
Another advantage Nvidia claims over AMD's GPUs involves the hardware tessellation engine. Introduced into the DirectX 11 API with the aim of improving geometric detail in games, Nvidia has taken a very different approach to AMD. Instead of placing a single tessellation engine at the front end of the geometry pipeline, Nvidia has given Fermi chips a hefty 16 tessellators operating in parallel.
Admittedly, AMD and Nvidia's tessellators are not directly comparable, and even Nvidia probably wouldn't claim that the GTX 480 has 16 times the tessellation performance of a Radeon HD 5870.
However, early benchmarks suggest a clear lead in performance in this area for Fermi. The final key differentiator for Nvidia's new wonder chip concerns GPGPU (in other words, running general-purpose software rather than graphics engines on the GPU). More than any previous graphics chip, Fermi has been optimised for this concept. Time will tell how important this will prove.
For now, there are few desktop applications beyond graphics that are able to hook into the huge parallel performance of a modern graphics chip. Thanks to both the inclusion of the Compute Shader in DirectX 11 and the increasing maturity of its open-source alternative, OpenCL, that's expected to change soon.
Then again, we've been expressing similar sentiments for the better part of two years. Put simply, the benefi t of GPGPU is unproven. In the meantime, Nvidia has arguably the fastest graphics chip on the market in the GeForce GTX 480.
However, in our benchmarks (which included games such as Crysis, Just Cause 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2), the gap between it and a standard Radeon HD 5870 is much too small and inconsistent to justify the 50 per cent price premium.
That said, Asus' ENGTX480 ups the GTX 480's ante by enabling the core voltage to be increased and opening the door to extreme overclocking. Whether that's actually a good idea for a chip that runs extremely hot even at stock voltages and clockspeeds is another matter.
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In Depth: How to convert video for your iPod or iPhone
To play videos on an iPod, iPod touch or iPhone, you need to ensure the file is of the correct type. The video needs to be encoded using a codec that your device understands, and the picture has to be the correct size for the screen.
Once you have a file that meets these standards, you can drag it into iTunes and then copy it to your iPod or iPhone.
There are several different programs that will convert video for you. The trick is finding one you can get along with and that makes the process as easy as possible.
Most conversion utilities store the requirements of an iPod or iPhone as a profile, so all you need to do is select your file, choose a destination, and pick the profile that works.
Some iPods need slightly different profiles, so it's a good idea to make a note of the precise model and generation of your iPod before you start converting video.
Videora
One conversion program is Videora. It's ad supported, so you may need to pick around some banners to find the controls you need.
In its simple mode, video conversion is straightforward – see the walkthrough on the left. A nice touch with Videora is by default it automatically adds your video to iTunes, ready for you to sync to your iPod or iPhone when you next plug it in.
HandBrake
An alternative, if you want to avoid advertising is HandBrake. This is open source and cross-platform, and is also quite easy to use. The interface has a lot of options, but you can comfortably ignore most of them and just opt for the profile that matches your device.
Launch HandBrake and click Source > Video file. Browse to the file you want to convert and click Open. Browse to your destination folder and select it. In the right-hand pane under presets, choose Apple > iPod, or "iPhone & iPod Touch".
Click Start to begin encoding. Once it's done, drag the newly converted file to iTunes, then transfer it to your device.
Freez
Freez iPod Video Converter will also convert video from many formats into a type recognised by your iPod. It's also free to download.
Install and launch the program and select your movie file. Now choose the destination folder, tweak some basic video and audio settings if you wish, and click the Convert button. Again, once it's finished, use iTunes to transfer the converted movie to your iPod.
Other devices
Other mobile phones and MPEG-4 players are capable of playing video, but you'll need to convert it to the correct size and format and use the device's utility software to transfer the file across.
One option is to set HandBrake to convert the video to a format that matches your device. Another option is PocketDivXEncoder.
Download and launch it, then select a target device from the list, picking the closest match. Click Browse under "1 – File to encode". Locate your movie file and click Open. Then click Browse under "2 – Output file" to set the destination folder.
The Output options show you what size your file will be. Click the Resize button if you need to change the dimensions to match your device's screen, or adjust the audio and video quality sliders to get the best balance between video quality and file size. Click Preview to check your converted file.
This encodes a short clip using the settings you've chosen, so you can see whether the quality is good enough. When you're happy, click Encode Now.
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Review: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Toxic
Can a PC graphics card be too powerful? As cards have become ever larger, more expensive and complex in recent years, that question has become a key one. Intriguingly, the two big players in computer graphics – AMD and Nvidia – have different answers.
Nvidia has been sticking to its traditional approach of building literally the biggest graphics chips possible – the monumental new GeForce GTX 480.
AMD, however, has gone in the opposite direction. With both of its previous flagship GPUs – the Radeon HD 3800 and Radeon HD 4800 – AMD wound back the afterburners and delivered slightly smaller, more cost-effective chips.
According to AMD, the aim is to maximise performance at the relatively accessible £200 price point. That makes for a more relevant graphics card than the sort of £400 monster few can afford.
Toxic relationship
It was slightly surprising, therefore, to find that AMD's latest uber-GPU – the Radeon HD 5870 – is a bit of an old-school bruiser. Launched late last year, the 5870 represents a near-doubling of the Radeon HD 4800's specifi cations. The stream shader count explodes from 800 for the Radeon HD 4800 to a scarcely believable 1,600.
Likewise the 5870 packs twice as many texture and render outputs, at 80 and 32 respectively. Of course, the 5870 was also AMD's first GPU to deliver support for DirectX 11, Microsoft's latest multimedia API.
With that comes a requirement for new hardware features. Most notable is the tessellator – a sort of geometry creation engine designed to improve the realism of 3D graphics. Think curvier, more detailed surfaces and fewer boxy-looking objects and you'll get the idea.
Inevitably, the added features only make the 5870 even more complex. Put it all together and you have a chip containing 2.15 billion transistors. Not only is that well over double the 4800, it's also around 80 per cent more than any currently available CPU. Make no mistake: this is an incredibly complex chip.
Power vs value
The problem is, despite the use of the latest 40nm silicon production process, at around 330mm2 the 5870 is much larger than the 265mm2 4800. Larger chips are of course more expensive. Even now, several months after launch, the cheapest 5870s command more than £300.
With that in mind, you might think that Sapphire is going in entirely the wrong direction with its newest Radeon HD 5870 board. At £399 it's the most expensive we've seen yet. What could possibly justify the added cost?
Most obvious is the doubling of graphics memory from 1GB to 2GB. Cards with added graphics memory often tend to be marketing gimmicks, but Sapphire would argue that extra memory can be a major benefit when running games at ultra-high resolution and detail settings – just the sort of workloads this card is designed for.
For good measure Sapphire has also upped the core and memory clockspeeds from 850MHz and 4.8GHz to 926MHz and 4.9GHz. So even without the added memory, it ought to be faster than a standard 5870. And so it proves.
Admittedly, the advantage in most benchmarks is marginal: perhaps one or two more frames rendered per second. The real difference comes when running the most technically advanced and demanding 3D games. The classic example here is Crytek's magisterial Crysis: Warhead. It's been around for nearly 18 months, but it's still the most visually stunning 3D engine yet created.
More importantly, it consumes astonishing amounts of graphics memory, particularly when running at super-high resolutions such as 2,560 x 1,600. Crysis: Warhead demands so much memory that the standard 1GB 5870 can't cope and is forced to fall back onto system memory to accommodate some of the texture, geometry and shader data. Such swapping of data over the PCI Express bus can really hurt performance, explaining why Sapphire's 2GB card is sometimes 50 per cent faster when running Crysis.
But is that worth nearly £100 extra? Rationally speaking, it's hard to justify. But for those willing to spend £300 in the first place, the future-proofing that comes with 2GB of memory might actually make sense...
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Deals: Voucher code roundup: save money on tech gear
We've scoured the internet for some of the best discount-codes available, offering you savings on everything from digital cameras to MP3 players.
Make sure you take advantage of these deals before they expire though, and make sure you also check out our weekly Bargain Hunt for more hot deals.
Here are the best new tech voucher-codes:
General:
10% discount on everything web site purchase from UKHost4u - offer expires 02/09/10
8% off all Technology ranges from Robert Dyas - offer expires 30/06/10
Digital Cameras:
Get 5% off Canon SX210 from Comet - offer expires 30/05/10
Laptops:
5% off all laptops over £499 from Comet - offer expires 30/05/10
Audio/Visual:
Get £5 off £150 or more spend (excludes purchases of Laptops, Sat navs and MP3 players) from Bennetts Electrical - offer expires 31/05/10.
5% off all TVs over £800 from Dixons - offer expires 24/05/10
Mobiles:
Get a free Nintendo Wii, Wii Sports Resort and £40 Automatic Cashback with the LG KP500 Cookie on Orange Dolphin £20 (24mths) contract from e2save - offer expires 31/05/10
Free Vodafone 533 Petrol handset on 12 month SIM Only deals (excluding £10 tariffs) from Vodafone - offer expires 31/05/10
Software, peripherals and components:
£4 off orders of £45 or more on all ink, toner and paper from Cartridge Monkey - offer expires 11/06/2010
10% off all printers from Comet - offer expires 30/05/10
Offers still valid:
Free Samsung 32 HD TV with the Nokia X3 on Orange Dolphin £30 (24mths) from e2save - offer expires 31/0510
£10 off HP DV7 (VJ221EA) from Laptops Direct - offer expires 31/05/10
10 percent off all computer speakers from Comet - offer expires 30/05/10
Get a free Vodafone 340 handset on 12 month SIM Only deals (excluding £10 tariffs) from Vodafone - offer expires 31/05/10
£10 off HP DV7 (VJ221EA) from Laptops Direct - offer expires 31/05/10
Get 20 percent off the Exilim EX-G1 from Casio Online - offer expires 31/05/10
Get £10 off a £300 spend on laptops, sat-navs or MP3 players from Bennetts Electrical - offer expires 31/05/2010
Get £10 off a £300 spend on laptops, sat-navs or MP3 players from Bennetts Electrical - offer expires 31/05/2010
Save £4 on orders of £45 or more on ink, toner or paper from Cartridge Monkey - offer expires 11/06/2010
Get £20 off the Asus G70S from Laptops Direct - offer expires 31/05/2010
Save £10 on the Acer Aspire 7736 from Laptops Direct - offer expries 31/05/2010
Free Sony Playstation 3 Slim with the Samsung S5230 Tocco Lite on Orange Dolphin from e2save - offer expires 31/07/2010 (Read Samsung S5230 Tocco Lite review)
Free Vodafone 533 Ice handset on 12 month SIM Only deals (excluding £10 tariffs) from Vodafone - offer expires 31/05/2010
Free XBox 360 Elite bundle with Halo 3 and £20 cash back with the Blackberry 8250 on Orange Canary from e2save - offer expires 31/07/2010
Note: offers correct at time of posting.
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HTC Desire Android 2.2 upgrade is coming
HTC has announced that if you bought a handset from its 2010 range, then it is very likely that you will get automatically upgraded to Android 2.2 (Froyo) when the OS is officially released.
In a statement, the company explained that phones definitely getting the upgrade would be the HTC Desire and Droid, but did note that more handsets would likely get the upgrade.
"If your phone was launched this year, we will most likely offer an upgrade for it to the Froyo version," says the statement.
"This includes popular models like the Desire and Droid Incredible as well as hotly anticipated phones like the Evo 4G, MyTouch slide and upcoming models."
HTC Android 2.2 release date
HTC continues: "We will announce a full list of phones and dates once we are closer to launching the upgrades.
"We are working closely with Google and our other partners to ensure we have the earliest access to everything we need to provide a complete and solid Sense experience on Froyo.
"We expect to release all updates in the second half of this year but can't be more specific yet."
While there is no word whether the HTC Legend will get the 2.2 update, by the sound of the release it looks likely that HTC wants to equip as many of its handsets as possible with the new OS.
New features of Android 2.2 include a speed boost, Flash support (in your face iPhone) and bigger and better games, thanks to the ability to install apps to a memory card.
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