The OLPC Give One, Get One Program Debuts at Amazon

Last year, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization made its XO laptops available to the general public through a special promotion that gave one laptop to a child in a developing country for each laptop you purchased for yourself. That Give One, Get One program returns for a second year, and this time OLPC has partnered with Amazon for distribution.

It's the same deal as last year, with $399 purchasing two laptops--one that will be sent to you and one that will be used to help start pilot projects in the least developed nations in the world (see this FAQ at the OLPC's Wiki site for more). You can also choose to donate one or more XO laptops for $199 per laptop. (If you live outside the United States, Amazon UK will be handling distribution for the rest of the world.)

If you're not familiar with the XO laptop, here's a bit of history from an AP article published today:

Cambridge, Mass.-based One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit, sells the XO machines to governments in developing countries that give the computers to schoolchildren. The laptops use less power than regular PCs, and are designed to work in demanding, rural conditions. Almost all of them run open-source software, but versions that can run Windows are expected to be available next year.
[...]
About 473,000 XO laptops have been distributed in 31 countries, with nearly 200,000 more waiting to find their way into schools.

Last year, OLPC's Give One Get One campaign drew orders for more than 160,000 XO laptops in less than two months, more than half of which were routed to Rwanda, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and other poor countries.

About the size of a small textbook and made with a rugged plastic exterior, the XO laptop has built-in wireless networking and a unique screen that works in full color or black and white to make it readable under direct sunlight. Thanks to its flexible design and "transformer" hinge, the laptop easily assumes any of several configurations: standard laptop use, e-book reading, and gaming. It features a 7.5-inch, 1200×900 pixel TFT screen and self-refreshing display with higher resolution (200 DPI) than 95 percent of the laptops on the market today. It comes pre-loaded with the Linux-based Sugar operating system and loads of free and open-source software for drawing, writing, recording images and video, editing music, and browsing the web.

The OLPC XO laptop is available for ordering and shipment starting today.

--Agen G.N. Schmitz