Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

I just increased the quality of my XO experience by ten!

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

I just made working on the XO seem so much better! All I did was plug in a USB mouse! Honestly, I think some of my issues with getting used to it have revolved more around getting used to the track-pad than the OS.

The first 90-seconds with the mouse makes me fell like I’m using a different computer. I’m totally floored at how much more intuitive everything seems now. The operating system feels like I just got a upgrade. If you’ve got one of these laptops, get a mouse and try it out!

Okay, so now I’m talking it up too much and you’ll have expectations that are too high, but you do have to try it.

FYI - A USB Keyboard works too!

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The LCD Display on the XO Laptop

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

The LCD display is great in all areas (other than it’s size).

Color - The colors are great, I haven’t done any testing on the range but the few photos I’ve pulled up look beautiful.
Size - The size is small it’s only 7.5 inches across.
Pixels - it’s 1200 × 900 and the amazing thing is that it’s 200 dpi (I think most LCD displays these days are 85-100-ish, maybe 120).
Outside use - Using the LCD in direct sunlight gives an excellent image. The color goes away but you are left with a crisp grey-scale image. You’ll want to dim the LCD since you’re probably just wasting battery life. You’ll probably want to site so the sun is hitting on the display, but it hasn’t been nice enough out for me to try it like that for an extended period.

I can’t wait to use this outside on a nice sunny day instead of sitting inside. I can be on the porch, the park or the beach and be typing or maybe reading an eBook on it (I haven’t tested that out yet).

So the only problem for me, the display is a little small and the dots are way small. Most of the software does use normal size fonts and the higher dpi just makes it look crisper (the web browser pretends to be 840×630, instead of 1200×900 pixels, and the XO scales to give really crisp text). But some of the games (like SimCity) use such small dots for everything it’s really hard to see. I’ve found myself using my reading glasses a lot for using the XO (usually I only need reading glasses sometimes at night and sometimes in the morning). Enlarging the fonts work but you’ve got such a small precious amount of screen space you hate to waste it if not necessary.

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