Opera Running on the OLPC 193
An anonymous reader writes "The Opera developers have ported their browser to the $100 laptop. Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.' Claudio Santambrogio writes: 'Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent — the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer.'"
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Interesting)
I paid over EUR1600 for my LCD monitor, back in the day.
200DPI is very high resolution for a monitor, 2/3rds that of the 300 DPI considered acceptable for print. Add in subpixel rendering, and it means the screen should near enough be clear enough to read comfortably. Due to windoze brain-damage, lots of computer users still think in resolution-dependent pixel sizes.
But on a monitor, a font that is 10 points high (a real-world unit) should be the same height on a 640x480 display and a 2048x1560 one. It should just be far clearer on the latter.
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most important image ;) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I still want one (Score:5, Interesting)
It'll certainly make a much nicer ebook reader than most which are already available.
I'm surprised that companies like vTech and Leapster haven't looked into licensing these.
William
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:3, Interesting)
At that resolution, you don't need anti-aliasing, because you really can't see anything much smaller than a pixel. The 770 comes with Opera as standard, and it really does look amazing. I use mine as an eBook reader quite a lot (hats off to the FBReader guys); it's not quite as good as paper, but it's not far off and the convenience of being able to carry a lot of books in a jacket pocket makes up for it in a lot of situations. It's ideal for flying when space is at a real premium; I can load enough books to last me several weeks onto something that fits in a pocket.
OLPC is a cunning conspiracy . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
At some point, somebody realized that a super-cheap laptop could do 90% of what people want to do with laptops. How to get them made? Try to make it yourself, you'll end up like DeLorean - the industry'll see to it that you fail before you can upset their applecarts! So . . . yeah! Pretend you're trying to make it for third world children! Think of the children!
CEO's, captains of industry, unaware of what they're doing begin working to be involved in making the last thing in the world they want to make - exactly what the consuming public really wants - a tough, reliable laptop computer suitable for on-the-go use at rock-bottom (true commodity) prices! I wonder if any of them are stopping to think that these things will have an impact on how we (collectively) see computers and computing, and the price associated with them? Just look around this post - half the comments are "I'd like one of those!". If I knew that the manufacturer was able to make 'em and sell 'em for $100.00, it'd sure make me think twice about plunking down $700.00 for a machine which, while shinier, is unlikely to do a lot more for me as a mobile computing platform.
In a way, this could be vaguely akin to Henry Ford's contribution to the automotive industry - utility and pricing set to put one in every garage (on every laptop). You can have it any color you like - as long as it's green!
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:3, Interesting)