Sometimes it takes a few iterations to get the production process right. Maybe if Mary Lou Jensen’s reality distortion field had lasted a bit longer we would all have been better off.
I, for one, would buy one of these things in a minute if they were still available.
Which one? I saw XO and it was terrible. I am genuinely curious, did you actually use it actively? Because a lot of people take a quick look and then use their first impression. My meaning of terrible is that it was unusable compared to an equivalent LCD of the same price (I have to guess based on what I was told was the actual selling price of the overall product, about USD$250 in 2008 since OLPC was never transparent about their costs and Quanta holds such data tight). It had lower resolution. Lower brightness and color gamut in normal mode. Lower contrast in reflective mode.
> Mary Lou Jensen’s reality distortion field had lasted a bit longer we would all have been better off
I doubt it. btw, it is Jepsen, not Jensen. I work in the display industry. Most of the experts I talked to were surprised that anyone thought it would be successful. Which explains why the only investors were unsophisticated decision makers from UN. The millions wasted on it were taken from developing countries. That's a shame. Jepsen left the industry and now works on "practical telepathy". I think it is easier to shift the reality distortion field to a new set of victims than it is to actually make genuine improvements to a technology.
The OLPC as a whole was a mixed bag; a successful experiment, I think, even if the project was a bit of a fiasco. The keyboard was trash, not just because of its size, but because the rubberized keys would frequently fail to capture key presses. The OS they released was buggy and poorly conceived in many ways. The OLPC was also released right before cheap netbooks and tablets hit the market, obviating the project's main value proposition.
But other things worked well, and the screen was one of them, at least for my purposes. I lived in Miami at the time, and it was only with the OLPC laptop that I was able to code while sitting out on my porch. I fixed the keyboard problem by plugging a mechanical keyboard into the USB port, and avoided the custom OS by dropping into the shell and telnetting into my workstation. Even with those awkward hacks, I still enjoyed coding on it because it let me do something I couldn't do otherwise.
The relative cost of the screen wasn't an issue for me. I would have paid quite a bit more than I did, just to have a working laptop (or even a terminal) that was usable in the bright sunlight. And buying an OLPC was meant to be more of a charitable gift anyway.
From your comments on Jepsen, it sounds to me like one of the challenges that Pixel Qi's technology faced was that it was promoted by the wrong messenger. Maybe you're right that there wouldn't have been a larger market for it, even if it had been rolled out with industry support as a commercial project instead of as part of an NGO. I don't know, though.
A screen that can be seen in the sun without a backlight draws less power, and most people use their mobile devices and laptops outside at least part of the time. Even with a full backlight, most screens today cannot be used in direct sunlight, and any outdoor use draws more power than indoor use, not less, which is the reverse of what it should be. I found the experience of using the OLPC screen perfect for what I wanted to do with it, and I think there would be a large enough niche to support reasonable unit economics if the product were marketed the right way to the right people.
Apologies for getting Jepsen's name wrong, by the way. Blame it on my typing out my first comment out on my phone.
