LATU Uruguay, the government entity testing both Intel's Classmate PC and One Laptop Per Child's XO computer has rated the XO-1 the better option for the children of Uruguay's Florida province, 56.84 points to 53.06 points.

OLPC has just been awarded an order from Plan Ceibal for 90,000 XO's for teenagers in Uruguay. Yes, there will be a new XO specially for teenagers. Uruguay already has 380,000 of the original XOs for younger children, and now the kids can graduate to one designed for them as they mature. It's to be a dual boot laptop. Note not triple boot. No Microsoft in this picture at all.

Uruguay has joined the small number of nations providing a laptop for every child attending state primary school.

The Agency for the Development of Government Electronic Management and Information and Knowledge Society of Uruguay have now published their recommendation that public documents use either ODF or PDF. The former should be used for documents in the process of being edited and the latter for documents in final form. (To see a discussion of these document uses, see my May, 2006, blog entry.)

"India is the latest of the countries where the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) experiment has started. Children from the village of Khairat were given the opportunity to learn how to use the XO laptop. During the last year XO was distributed to children from Arahuay in Peru, Ban Samkha in Thailand, Cardal in Uruguay and Galadima in Nigeria.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has been in the news a lot in recent months. Reports last fall that Uruguay purchased 100,000 XO laptops and soon US consumers could do the same via a special campaign soon gave way to news items about a patent lawsuit and Intel's abrupt departure from OLPC's board.

"Again, a quoted problem is teacher training concerns. Peru did an intensive program in the pilot programme where teachers were given one-on-three training by the deployment team. Uruguay AFAIK just handed the laptops out. …"

http://www.olpcnews.com/implementation/plan/olpc_education_project_learn...

This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops. And I was there to hand out the first one.

Late last year Uruguay landed its first shipment of 100,000 units of the much lauded, sometimes criticised XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation. Buoyed by that success, Walter Bender, president software and content at OLPC effused over the next countries in line for the little green machine. The question is, however, can the likes of Peru, Mexico, Ethiopia, Haiti, Rwanda, Mongolia and a myriad of other impoverished countries stump up with the cash needed to join the OLPC bandwagon? The sums are not that difficult to do.