OLPC and Datawind to collaborate on £50 solar-powered tablet

One Laptop per Child, the education not-for-profit that provides cheap low-cost laptops to children in developing countries, is building a new device in partnership with Datawind, makers of the $50 (£29) Aakash tablets.

"We are developing an intermediate tablet that will have a solar panel and a keyboard for less than $80 (£50). We have improved many of the things we thought needed to be improved -- from screen resolution, to battery life and many other things," Rodrigo Arboleda, OLPC's CEO, tells Wired.co.uk at the Transform Africa summit in Rwanda this week.

"We have signed agreements with UNESCO, with Sesame Street, with Discovery, with Oxford University, with Barnes and Noble -- so we have a complete ecosystem of education, which is very important," says Arboleda. "Our main point is that we are educators, and it is the user interface that it is important. We want to make sure that the vehicle is part of the ecosystem."

One Laptop per Child unveiled its first Android slate, the XO Tablet (pictured), earlier this year, which signalled the organisation's departure from exclusively producing Linux-based laptops.

"Since we started the project, two very important elements have become a reality. One is the touchscreen, which was not present at the time we started; the other is the Android operating system, which has given a broader base of hundreds of thousands of applications that are capable of being incorporated into a learning environment," says Arboleda.

The XO laptops created by OLPC were criticised by some for the dual-boot operating systems on board, but the introduction of Android makes far more sense.

The XO history

The XO Tablets have a customised Android interface that divides in two from the lock screen. You enter either parent/teacher mode (the standard Android interface) or student mode. In student mode there are 150 pre-installed applications and around 100 books, with the content arranged into dream careers and allowing users to develop various levels of skill for each.

When we spent some hands-on time with the seven-inch tablet and found the interface to be slick and easy to navigate. The tablet itself is different to probably any other Android device you've ever seen, as it's surrounded by a thick green rubber shell. It has a distinctive blue "X" symbol on the back and a green "O" loop protruding from one corner -- presumably to make it easier to carry.

In terms of its specs, it has 1.6GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage, with a 1,024x600-pixel display and a two-megapixel camera. With those credentials, it rates just as highly -- or even more so -- than some of the budget Android tablets recently launched in the UK including Argos's MyTablet and Carphone Warehouse's Avoca 7. The reason this matters is that it's currently being marketed as a consumer product in Walmart in the US for $150 (£93) -- and has been since its launch.

This might seem at odds with OLPC's not-for-profit ethos, and it raised some eyebrows at the time. The reason the company decided to do it this way around, rather than introduce it as part of OLPC's education scheme, Arboleda explains, is that when the organisation landed in many countries, people wanted to know if the product had been released in the US. Because it hadn't, the perception was that if it wasn't good enough for the US, why would OLPC think it was good enough for them?

"It's not that it's not good enough for the United States, it's that this is intended for developing nations," he says. "But we have found pockets of ignorance, poverty and violence in many cities in the US equally in dear need of something like this as much as any country in Africa, South America and Asia. So we decided to go to the United States, but because it's such a sophisticated market we started with the retail market rather than the institutional market."

The tablet is of course spreading its wings, and there are now 10,000 of them in the hands of schoolchildren in Uruguay. They are also set to land in Rwanda soon too, thanks to the ongoing success of the OLPC project in both of these countries.

It's perhaps not surprising that OLPC is now partnering with Datawind, makers of the Aakash tablet, which was developed first for the Indian educational market, for it has long been complimentary of the company and the two organisations have similar aims.

With both the XO Tablet and the Aakash tablet now on sale internationally to consumers, we should also expect any future devices the two companies release to be widely available outside of the institutional market in the developing world. They will be available wherever there is demand for them, says Arboleda -- which means they'll likely give Argos, Carphone Warehouse et al a run for their money.