Low-Cost Laptops for Children in Developing Countries Buggy, Slow

Jan 28, 11:26 AM

By Martha Mendoza

The Associated Press

Little, cheap and sturdy, laptops designed to bring technology to the children of developing countries are rolling out after years of promises. But don't expect them to do much for high-tech kids in the United States.

This winter I handed one - Intel's Classmate PC - to my 14-year- old son, a high school freshman who has been pestering us for a computer to use at school.

"It's cute," he said. "Kind of dinky. I'll do my work on this, but can I also play some games?"

Meanwhile, my sister and her husband in Seattle bought their kids an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, telling their 10-year-old daughter Rebecca to "have fun, figure out how this works, and teach the rest of us."

Rebecca was thrilled, but then she usually is when you hand her anything challenging.

Within a few weeks, however, both computers were barely being used, benched, as it were, by lackluster performance and frustrating bugs. The problems were bad enough to turn off our kids.

Admittedly, it might be a different story if our children - like those in developing countries - were not already familiar with high- end laptops, ubiquitous Wi-Fi and YouTube. Still, it's hard to imagine how the problems we encountered would not eventually pose an obstacle regardless of locale or expectations.

The Classmate PC and the OLPC are, at this point, the leading players in the emerging market of rugged, low-cost laptops designed to bring a new educational opportunity to children without access to technology. Analysts at Gartner say more than 6 million of the ultra low-cost PCs will ship by 2012, although there are fewer than 100,000 circulating so far.

Neither the Classmate PC nor the OLPC are currently for sale in the United States. Although there are some similarities - both are about half the size of a 17-inch laptop, and both aim to improve poor children's lives - there are some fundamental differences: The OLPC is a tutor unto itself, designed to educate a child who may not have access to a classroom or a teacher; the Classmate PC, on the other hand, comes with educational software and systems to be used in classrooms as a learning assistant.

One Laptop Per Child is a nonprofit founded in 2005. The original concept was to offer a "$100 laptop," but prices have crept up on the green-and-white low-power "XO" computer, now selling for closer to $200. My sister and her husband bought theirs for $400, part of a deal offered for six weeks last year that allowed them to keep one and donate another to a child in a developing country.

"People spend more than that on an expensive toy for their kids, and from the reviews we read this was a real computer that actually worked well," said my sister, Karen Snyder.

The OLPC runs on the Linux operating system and a chip made by Advanced Micro Devices. The software was complicated and buggy. For weeks neither my brilliant niece, nor her well educated parents, could figure out how to get it to connect online.

They eventually reconfigured and upgraded the operating system, a complex process not doable by a computer rookie. Pity the child in a remote village trying to figure out this instruction from the OLPC Web site: "At your root prompt, type: olpc-update (build-no) where (build-no) is the name of the build you would like."

Even worse, in order to save trees, the OLPC arrived with few printed instructions. Instead users were directed to a Web site for help, an insurmountable challenge if this was their only computer.

Even the upgraded OLPC has been remarkably slow, often requiring repeated attempts to log in and balking at opening more than a few programs at a time.

My niece Rebecca is defensive about her "cute" computer: "It has really fun games and it's easy to carry around and it's fun to figure things out on it."

She is trying to write a story on it for a class assignment, and she said she likes the "small keyboard with really squishy keys that are fun to type on." The battery, she noted, lasts all day, but she's having trouble printing.

My son Raymond, meanwhile, was getting to know the Classmate PC, which runs from $230 to $300. The rugged blue cover proved tough enough for the daily bike commute to school. The flimsy-looking magnetic snap showed no sign of wear despite weeks of constant opening and closing.

The computer operates at a moderate pace using a stripped-down version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Raymond could stream short videos or play simple games as long as he didn't have too many windows open.

But there were challenges. The small, unusual keyboard was hard to type on. He got halfway through an essay before switching to a larger computer, frustrated by his higher-than-usual number of typos.

He tried writing a history paper about ancient Rome, but found the computer couldn't power up several Web sites and a word processor at the same time. For physics, he downloaded bridge- building software and was stymied by the undersized monitor.

The Classmate PC was deemed "OK" for taking notes in class, but it took so long booting up he had to carry it open between classes or miss a few minutes of a lecture. As for the cool factor, it was deemed "cute" by friends but "terrible looking" by the school IT Team. Then again, he said, those kids "are the computer snobs."

His biggest problem with his Classmate PC was the power adapter, which slipped out very easily. But the battery lasted through a day of school.

Raymond said he supported bringing computers to needy kids, but said a school might be better off with a dozen really good computers in a lab rather than mediocre computers for every child.

"It's still better to have a really good teacher," he said. "They're a lot more important than computers." By Martha Mendoza

The Associated Press

Little, cheap and sturdy, laptops designed to bring technology to the children of developing countries are rolling out after years of promises. But don't expect them to do much for high-tech kids in the United States.

This winter I handed one - Intel's Classmate PC - to my 14-year- old son, a high school freshman who has been pestering us for a computer to use at school.

"It's cute," he said. "Kind of dinky. I'll do my work on this, but can I also play some games?"

Meanwhile, my sister and her husband in Seattle bought their kids an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, telling their 10-year-old daughter Rebecca to "have fun, figure out how this works, and teach the rest of us."

Rebecca was thrilled, but then she usually is when you hand her anything challenging.

Within a few weeks, however, both computers were barely being used, benched, as it were, by lackluster performance and frustrating bugs. The problems were bad enough to turn off our kids.

Admittedly, it might be a different story if our children - like those in developing countries - were not already familiar with high- end laptops, ubiquitous Wi-Fi and YouTube. Still, it's hard to imagine how the problems we encountered would not eventually pose an obstacle regardless of locale or expectations.

The Classmate PC and the OLPC are, at this point, the leading players in the emerging market of rugged, low-cost laptops designed to bring a new educational opportunity to children without access to technology. Analysts at Gartner say more than 6 million of the ultra low-cost PCs will ship by 2012, although there are fewer than 100,000 circulating so far.

Neither the Classmate PC nor the OLPC are currently for sale in the United States. Although there are some similarities - both are about half the size of a 17-inch laptop, and both aim to improve poor children's lives - there are some fundamental differences: The OLPC is a tutor unto itself, designed to educate a child who may not have access to a classroom or a teacher; the Classmate PC, on the other hand, comes with educational software and systems to be used in classrooms as a learning assistant.

One Laptop Per Child is a nonprofit founded in 2005. The original concept was to offer a "$100 laptop," but prices have crept up on the green-and-white low-power "XO" computer, now selling for closer to $200. My sister and her husband bought theirs for $400, part of a deal offered for six weeks last year that allowed them to keep one and donate another to a child in a developing country.

"People spend more than that on an expensive toy for their kids, and from the reviews we read this was a real computer that actually worked well," said my sister, Karen Snyder.

The OLPC runs on the Linux operating system and a chip made by Advanced Micro Devices. The software was complicated and buggy. For weeks neither my brilliant niece, nor her well educated parents, could figure out how to get it to connect online.

They eventually reconfigured and upgraded the operating system, a complex process not doable by a computer rookie. Pity the child in a remote village trying to figure out this instruction from the OLPC Web site: "At your root prompt, type: olpc-update (build-no) where (build-no) is the name of the build you would like."

Even worse, in order to save trees, the OLPC arrived with few printed instructions. Instead users were directed to a Web site for help, an insurmountable challenge if this was their only computer.

Even the upgraded OLPC has been remarkably slow, often requiring repeated attempts to log in and balking at opening more than a few programs at a time.

My niece Rebecca is defensive about her "cute" computer: "It has really fun games and it's easy to carry around and it's fun to figure things out on it."

She is trying to write a story on it for a class assignment, and she said she likes the "small keyboard with really squishy keys that are fun to type on." The battery, she noted, lasts all day, but she's having trouble printing.

My son Raymond, meanwhile, was getting to know the Classmate PC, which runs from $230 to $300. The rugged blue cover proved tough enough for the daily bike commute to school. The flimsy-looking magnetic snap showed no sign of wear despite weeks of constant opening and closing.

The computer operates at a moderate pace using a stripped-down version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Raymond could stream short videos or play simple games as long as he didn't have too many windows open.

But there were challenges. The small, unusual keyboard was hard to type on. He got halfway through an essay before switching to a larger computer, frustrated by his higher-than-usual number of typos.

He tried writing a history paper about ancient Rome, but found the computer couldn't power up several Web sites and a word processor at the same time. For physics, he downloaded bridge- building software and was stymied by the undersized monitor.

The Classmate PC was deemed "OK" for taking notes in class, but it took so long booting up he had to carry it open between classes or miss a few minutes of a lecture. As for the cool factor, it was deemed "cute" by friends but "terrible looking" by the school IT Team. Then again, he said, those kids "are the computer snobs."

His biggest problem with his Classmate PC was the power adapter, which slipped out very easily. But the battery lasted through a day of school.

Raymond said he supported bringing computers to needy kids, but said a school might be better off with a dozen really good computers in a lab rather than mediocre computers for every child.

"It's still better to have a really good teacher," he said. "They're a lot more important than computers."

(c) 2008 Virginian - Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. Low-Cost Laptops for Children in Developing Countries Buggy, Slow
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