My Take on the XO So Far

Well, it's been about a day and half since I got my XO. First off, it's a great little device. It does the basic stuff I think most of us need from a computer these days. I can process words, surf and even instant message, though I have not IMed anyone on it yet, but PixelFish was IMing me from her XO the other night, so I know it's possible.



Last night the challenge was working out how to log in to a WPA-encrypted network, which was not a huge deal at all (there's a page on the wiki with straightforward instructions). Sadly it was more complicated than it probably should have been, but hey, it's early. I'm sure they'll work this kink out in time.



Last night, I tried to get Gnash to run MP4s and Flash. Sadly, I couldn't find the installed version to configure it so I assumed there was no installed version. So, I downloaded it and tried to install it--no luck. Then when looking for instructions, I discovered it IS installed, but I couldn't find any mention of where it is on the system so I STILL couldn't configure it. Instead, I just decided to install the Adobe Flash plugin. That's allowed videos and audio clips to run, but the video is choppy and not at all smooth while the audio mostly runs fine.



I think those are the limitations of a 433 mhz machine, sadly. I did get listen to some of my tracks on http://Anywhere.FM/ so that was cool. They streamed perfectly well, too.



This afternoon I installed Opera on there using the instructions on the OLPCNews.com/forum. It was surprisingly easy, actually. Opera runs really well, but, interestingly enough, doesn't seem to run Flash very well. Anywhere.FM took forever to load. I didn't test YouTube on it, but I will soon.



I'm going to spend the next week putting it through it's paces and trying to get it to do the things I need it to do--like allow me to blog, work on a novel and do minor multimedia stuff. The other thing I noticed was that Flash doesn't seem to like the built-in camera. I went to both BlogTV.com and SnapYap.com and neither Flash apps worked with the camera. This is kind of disappointing since I wanted to use both sites with my XO. :(



OK, that's it for now--I need to crash. Sooo very much to do in the next two days. I hope everyone is having a nice relaxing holiday season so far!!



Beyond that, it's definitely a cool gadget, but I'm not sure how "ready for prime time" it is.
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