I finally received an XO! The laptop designed to be a medium for education in developing countries. I will take some time with the little guy before offering my impressions or even a review. I’m late to the party and great reviews are already out there. The XO took five months to find me but I’m happy to finally be able to have a look at it. When the Fedex guy arrived at my house with that small box, I thought OLPC had shipped me a battery pack. The laptop is much smaller than I expected but heavier than I thought it would be.

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When I donated to OLPC last December, I knew it would take some time to receive an XO. OLPC had taken the care to explain they had problems getting the XO to ship due to delays in production. I was eager to try out the XO and provide a review, followed by a look at the learning and teaching community that was growing behind the laptop. We now know that OLPC has had more problems than production delays. There were management and deployment issues, internal visions and ideological conflicts, fierce competition from big manufacturers, etc. By March, I suspected there were managing difficulties in the Give-one, Get-one program and after five emails that never really answered my questions, I called them to have a shipping status update.

The phone conversation with someone from OLPC’s support was very confusing. Obviously, the person I was speaking with, a very nice lady by the way, had no idea what was going on and had very few answers for me. Basically, she said she had no way to verify if an XO had been sent to me or not. So I called FEDEX and they confirmed that they had a package sent for me. However, they had to return it to the sender after keeping it for two weeks. FEDEX told me they were missing information to clear customs with my package and finally deliver it to me. For two weeks, they tried to reach the sender, in this case, a company handling shipping stocks for OLPC, so I was told, without success. Nobody returned any calls or emails. FEDEX returned the package.

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This is definitely a moment in OLPC’s history of big changes as views are conflicting on what the mission should really be about. This week, we have two important announcements: Microsoft is officially pushing Windows XP into the XO and Sugar Labs is no longer dedicated to the XO but will now offer the possibilities of building a “learning ecosystem” on all platforms.

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