Remember the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative? An ambitious and well-intentioned project to:
“develop a low-cost ($100) – a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. The goal is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves.”
A truly noble goal, which helped itself not one iota, with the XO-1 design, which was rolled out to third-world countries, in November 2007. It was, sadly, one of the ugliest personal computers that the world has ever seen. It had some designed-by-committee faults as well and was not the success we all hoped for.

Well, it seems that team at OLPC has had a rethink, and possibly taken some advice, and come up with a new concept for a second run at this idea. The XO-3:

Nicholas Negroponte, project leader at OLPC, has announced a tie-up with Marvell, to design and produce the new model. It’s planned to show the design in January 2011, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Some of the specs being leaked so far: An ARM processor,a multilingual, multitouch-screen keyboard with haptic feedback, two cameras, high-quality video (Flash 10 and 1080p) and a version of Google’s Android operating system (Intitially, anyway. OLPC has their own, favoured custom OS). Apparently, the XO-3 tablet will use only 1 watt per hour, a huge improvement on the already frugal XO-1, at 5 watts per hour.