One Laptop Per Child or OLPC project is now focusing on expansion of its domain. This non profit organisation has recently decided to keep away from the small scale deployment of XO laptops and has started to focus on large scale deployments of the devices. This strategy is adopted to combat the recession. The OLPC will now break its operations on regional basis and start giving the laptops.

This change is also initiated by a loss in interest in Give 1 Get 1 program, which was the major source of funding for OLPC. The G1G1 program was a big hit in its initial and subsequent stages but last year the program’s sales dropped tremendously. According to OLPC founder and Chairman Nicholas Negroponte, “This year G1G1 was less than 10 percent of the previous year. Not good; perhaps in keeping with the economic times.” Of course, sales of netbooks, like the Samsung NC10, are actually soaring during the same tough economic times; so maybe there is something else amiss with the OLPC XO laptop. Apart from this another program called ‘Change the World’ was also discontinued by OLPC. This program was aimed at small deployments of XO laptops with a hope that it will bolster the program’s success in future. Unfortunately this didn’t happened and thus the OLPC now targets large deployment of XO. OLPC will now put special emphasis on Sub-Sahara, Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

One Laptop Per Child, popularly known as the OLPC project, is gaining success day by day at a very fast pace. Aimed at stimulating the growth and development of children in developing nations, the project has put a smile on 600,000 children so far and still continues to make more and more children happy everyday.

According to the OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte, 600,000 children in developing nations are using the OLPC’s ultra-cheap XO Laptop as of now. He also clarifies that this figure does not include the number of promised laptops, rather it shows the total laptops that have actually been delivered into the hands of children and are being used by them at schools and homes. The laptops donated under the OLPC project consist of small Asus Eee PC sized laptops running on Sugar OS (a Linux based operating system). These laptops come equipped with all the necessary applications, including a word processor, games, music maker and much more, to help children learn and comprehensively develop their computing skills.

So far the shipment of XO laptops has been made in 31 countries including Peru, Rwanda, and Cambodia and according to Negroponte Palestine will be the next nation to receive the shipment. He also said that by mid 2009 every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop.

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The much awaited $100 laptops will start selling in Europe on 17th November. These laptops will be sold on Amazon’s outlets online by the organization called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) as a part of their give one get one scheme which has already made its debut in the US where it saw a sales of 190,000 machines.

According to this scheme, every time a person buys a laptop, one machine will be donated to a deserving child in a developing nation. The green and white XO laptops will be sold in at least 27 European nations according to a speech delivered in the World of Health IT Conference, Copenhagen by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC.

The XO laptop will be priced at $268 for retail customers will also be available in Russia, Switzerland and Turkey, which is around the same price, or actually a little more, than the Dell Latitude D610. However, the success of this XO scheme was hampered by OLPC’s inability to deliver machines which were ordered on time. This is one of the reasons why an agreement was signed in September 2008 with Amazon.

The idea started with OLPC’s ambition of manufacturing powerful laptops costing less than $100 for school children. When the machine finally made an entry, it was priced at $188 and saw a sale of 600,000 units.

Though there was a lot of interest shown by nations all over the world, the XO was not sold in the numbers as expected by OLPC. 65,000 units have been ordered for recently by Columbia’s Caldas region.

With competition heating up from the Classmate laptop from Intel, we will have to wait and see the impact of this on sale of XO in Europe.

One Laptop Per Child, popularly known as OLPC has achieved great success in developing countries. To further promote this project the world pioneer in e-commerce, Amazon has announced that it will be selling the OLPC’s XO laptops through Amazon.com.

These laptops will be sold in the same way the G1G1 program was carried out. The buyers have to pay for two laptops out of which one will be shipped to the buyer itself and the other one will be donated to a child in developing country. Jim Gettys, vice president, software engineering, OLPC announced that only Linux based XO laptops will be sold through Amazon.com in US as of now.

However, the OLPC is finding out the possibility of extending this service to other countries too. The Linux based XO laptops that are approved for online selling has got an impressive configuration. All the units are powered by Linux Sugar operating system which offers all the necessary applications and a bunch of exciting games to enable the children get hold of the technology in a playful manner.

The hardware too is sufficient enough to handle all the tasks without any glitch. The XO laptops feature a 1GB of flash memory, 256MB of RAM and 7.5 inches of bright LCD. These laptops are optimized to support wireless networking too.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is really becoming a hot favourite in developing countries. Although the XO laptops are minimally powered, they are a perfect tool for making kids computer literate at a minimal cost. The goal of the programme is astoundingly to develop laptops that are even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC 701 4G. The only issue that the OLPC programme has faced is that the laptops used in this project are running on Linux based Sugar Operating System instead of Windows. While in some countries Sugar is considered as a great operating system, others argue that as the global workspace is dominated by the Windows based systems, the students should practice on the same platform; otherwise they will turn into computer literates but still incompetent in the Windows environment.

Thus the OLPC has decided to introduce new XO laptops running Windows XP Pro. As of now, Peru will be the first country to experience these newbies. In addition to this, a dual boot edition is also expected in future. To find out which OS the kids prefer, they were given both the laptops to work and play. The results were amazing. The kids find it easier to work on windows based XO machines but they still want to stick to the Sugar OS because of the array of pre-installed learning games that come with it. Obviously, both the operating systems offer excellent opportunities to learn and enjoy.