Negroponte Unveils Second Generation OLPC

Just a few months after shipping the first laptops, the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) is getting ready for round two. Chairman Nicholas Negroponte just unveiled the second generation laptop, going by the name XO-2 or XOXO.

Xoxo, laptop.org So here’s what it’ll look like. (Note the Matrix-like picture language? Ah, good times.)

Needless to say, from what Negroponte has shown it’s pretty amazing. (Am I biased obsessed? Well, in that case I think I can live with it.) The new generation is roughly half the size of the current version (or rather: the whole new machine seems to fit into the foldout screen of XO-1), and it features a dual touchscreen. Basically, it just consists of a dual touchscreen. So it’s a premium e-book, or a dual Pong screen, or half keyboard, half screen. Either way, it looks like the future is now. Think Minority Report meets International Aid.

And while that’s good news for developing countries, it’s probably good news for the industrialized world, too, namely for us gadget geeks: Just as the OLPC project pretty much created the low-price laptop segment (like the Asus EEE), XOXO will also push the prices for touch screen devices all the way down. I so want one! However, it’ll be another few years, aimed launch is 2010, for a planned cost of $75 per piece. (Again, it’s unlikely that they’ll hit that price, but even if they manage to produces these machines for, say, $100, who’s going to complain?)

Gizmodo has a picture gallery and a concise write-up, more coverage available directly from OLPC.

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