The Longest Now

Marvell and OLPC just announced a partnership to design a line of tablets, including the current Marvell Moby and the OLPC XO-3 reference designs.  This is good news for OLPC’s 3-year hardware plans, and make it more likely that we will be able to hit our target $75 pricepoint for a rugged, low-power tablet in 2012.

There are also a lot of interesting cheap computers out there today – some now available for $100 – flimsy at the moment, but a good start.  We need to start treating personal computing — and connectivity, caching, reliable storage: everything that comes with it — as a commodity and basic resource, not a luxury good.  Until we do, we will never build up the relevant infrastructure at scale.  [and the 10-100x differences in bandwidth available in different developed countries today — with the US on the low end — are a prime example of what this may look like].

Jordan Romero, 13-year old teenager from California remembers to call his mother from the top of Everest.  No serpent’s tooth he!

Yes, please.  (care of Weightshift’s Scott Robbin)

All tablets need this mode. I don’t know why the keyboard layout designed for hands-free elbows-up typing is used with little modification elsewhere in life. Anything that preserves the relative relation of the keys should be easily learnable.