Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

The OLPC program has announced a Give One, Get One program! Starting November 12th, you can pay $399 to give an XO-1 laptop to a child in need and simultaneously get one for yourself. What a novel idea! I figure since the entire purpose of the OLPC project is to provide needy children with computing capabilities, it’s only fair that it you want to buy one “at retail,” you should buy one for someone who needs one at the same time.

I wonder how the Asus Eee will fare against the XO-1. I’m thinking they’re aimed at different markets, so we probably won’t see much competition at all…

Microsoft has a limited-time-only sale starting in a few hours that lets students obtain Office 2007 Ultimate for a mere $60.

Hey, look what’s finally available for preorder on Steam!

…in saying some stuff about the release of the new iPod lineup. While I will contest that the shuffle still is, and will always be, utterly useless, the rest of the lineup looks pretty solid. Apple’s managed to extend video playback across all of their players now that the nano is sporting a bigger screen. The classic looks nice. 160GB of storage is totally ridiculous in a good way. You have to understand that I thought I had a lot of music with around ~1500 songs (6.10GB), so something like that would give me nigh-infinite expandability. I’m a fan of quality materials, so I was pleased to see the move to an all-metal casing for the classic. Should be a bit more damage resistant as well.

The real kicker here is the touch, and after hearing on digg that it runs the same apps as the iPhone, I’m sold. A great music/photo/video player coupled with WiFi, an awesome interface, browser, and potential for SSH and other nifty apps is a winner in my book. It has great potential as a thin client! The 16GB of storage doesn’t bug me, as all of my photos and music could fit on it with room to spare.

Also, I hear that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to iPhone owners, offering $100 in store credit to everyone who bought an iPhone before the announcement yesterday. There’s some good PR for you.

Obligatory jab at Microsoft: The Zune came up today in our conversation during MK399 - Marketing High Tech Products and was met with a fair amount of snickering. “It would be good if you could find another Zune user to share songs with!” said the audience. I didn’t think it was a bad device when it was launched; it just didn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the competition.

Also, I finally managed to get ActiveRotate working on my tablet, which re-orients the screen based on how you’re holding the machine. No more manual rotating when I go from laptop to tablet mode!