$100 laptop specifications

I've just read a post on the BBC (yeah the BBC), they have a detailed story about the OLPC laptop, and I must say it looks pretty interesting, kind of reminding me the first Apple iBooks, which were colored, and rounded. Man these machines were beautiful back than!

HARDWARE OVERVIEW-

• Processor: AMD 433 MHz

• Memory: 256MB SDRAM

• Storage: 1GB Flash

Anyway it looks like they have some great features that may soon surface on other laptops. First we must say it doesn't have any moving parts, not even a hard drive, it has a 1 GB Flash memory on board and can be extended with SD slots, it has a fairly slow Processor 433 MHz, with 256MB SDRAM.

Now that sounds really slow compared to the machines we have these day, but consider that it runs An embedded version of Red Hat Linux which was designed for the machine. (A friends of mine actually got it boot on his machine, looks really good, here a guide to installing the Sugar environment you can give it a try)

One of the great engineering achievements of this device is that they actually made a dual wi-fi antennas, known affectionately as "rabbit ears". These boost the range of the wireless connection by between two-and three-times the normal range.

The laptop has a low power dual-mode display, allowing children to toggle between color and black-and-white screens.

Designed for use in outdoor classrooms, the full-color transmissive mode is similar to any other Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), but in ultra low-power black-and-white mode the screen is readable in direct sunlight.

Many companies are interested in using the technology in standard laptop displays.
The screen can also swivel around to convert the laptop into an e-book or a games console.

The sealed green rubber keyboard is waterproof and its size is designed for a child's hands. As well as being offered in a standard QWERTY layout it has various configurations for different languages such as Thai, Arabic, Spanish, and Urdu.

In addition, the keyboard does away with low-use keys such as Caps Lock. In their place are new buttons such as the "geek key" or "view source", which allows children to quickly see the underlying code used to write the program running on screen.

A "grab" key allows children to pan and scroll around the screen while a slider key on the top left-hand-side of the keyboard allows users to quickly see who else is part of the mesh network, who they are working with on collaborative projects and which of their friends are online.

This sounds really good since I think its really important for education to have collaborative environment when students can share information and draw conclusions together.

The laptop also has a hard plastic case which is designed to be as waterproof and dustproof as possible for children walking to and from school.
Another great feature is the video camera with a resolution of 640x480, the camera can be used to take photographs or as a light meter for school projects, and i guess video conference in the near future.

Looks pretty impressive, you can see that some great deal of thought has been put to the unit.