The OLPC project aims to enable children to study and create in a collaborative environment that makes it natural to share documents and work on them together. To facilitate this, the XO-1 has built-in networking capabilities, most importantly an IEEE 802.1 chipset for wireless communications. Notable features here are the low energy consumption (paid for with a relatively low speed of 2 Mbits) and the ability to form a self-organised mesh network in the absence of an access point. The chipset is autonomous enough to allow the XO-1 to act as a repeater in the mesh even when the laptop CPU is powered down.

Since OLPC laptops are intended for deployment in areas where there will likely be no traditional telecom infrastructure, there are is no ethernet adaptor or modem (I wonder if there was similar reasoning behind the MacBook Air). Other means of getting data in and out are the USB ports and the SD card reader. And then there is the Acoustic Tape Measure program, that can be used to measure the distance between two laptops by measuring the time it takes for them to shout at each-other.

Whereas the hardware does not fail to impress, some areas of the XO-1 software in its current form feel unfinished and flakey. Being software, of course, it should be relatively easy to resolve these issues over time. One instance that caused me quite a bit of frustration at first was getting the WiFi to work. Although I would very much prefer a wired connection (faster, less radiation) I do have an access point that I occasionally switch on for the Wii, but the XO-1 would not connect to it. Turns out that the version of the OS that it came with has critical bugs here, but there was a new version (poetically named build 653) available for download. The process required some computer literacy, another computer with a working Internet connection and an SD card (or USB stick), but now it works.