Bert Freudenberg brought the OLPC laptop to dinner before Smalltalk Solutions 2007 in Toronto.
That gave me and about 20 others at the dinner to touch and play with the laptop for the first time. We had some fun opening it, I think the 6th person suceeded. I have to say, it is every bit as beautiful as in the pictures I have seen and more. There are some unusual buttons both on the keyboard and on the laptop and the UI is a bit different from the Qemu version I played with last.
Everyone had a chance to look at it or play, Vicki Ross created her first eToy animation in about 5 minutes. EToys feel almost the same speed as on and Athlon 2400 on which I am writing this which is great.
One thing I realized trying to build a quick presentation, is that we really need a different interface then the mouse pad or mouse. This is beside the point and not the OLPC fault, the mouse pad works pretty well, but really,mouse is an OK interface for *navigation* and copy/paste of text, but not very good for *manipulating* and building things - and eToys are very much about building. I wish someone could think of a better device after all those years... perhaps something that one can hold in hand, not flat, maybe similar to joystick, or sort of a piece of squishable/moldeable piece of clay-like material, well, not sure...
I believe we will have a chance to see the laptop on display at the Squeak booth during the conference.
Thanks Bert for bringing it over, it really is even nicer then I thought!
Milan