Green Daily

As it turned out, the team wound up designing the most environmentally-friendly laptop ever, almost by accident. In order to make the device usable under extreme conditions, like in villages with no access to electricity, Jepsen and her colleagues came up with some innovative solutions. For example, the XO can be powered by a variety of different devices which pump out a variety of different voltages. That means you can plug in a solar panel, a hand crank, or any wall outlet you happen to have handy even if it doesn't supply the same voltage as the outlets in another country.

And so that you don't have to charge the batteries very often, the XO uses far less power than any other laptop on the market. A typical desktop computer uses 80 watts, while an average laptop uses 20 watts. The XO laptop uses just 2 watts.

Another goal was to make the XO durable. It's designed to last 5 years, and most of its parts are extremely easy to replace. In fact, Jepsen told a story about a group of Nigerian girls 11 years old and younger who took it upon themselves to start repairing parts in their friends' XO laptops that broke. They're not soldering anything to the computers' motherboards. but they are fixing problems with the keyboards, displays, or connectors. And if you can easily replace broken parts, that means you don't have to throw out obsolete electronics as often. Another environmental benefit.

The XO also uses recyclable parts, has a biodegradable battery, and avoids toxic chemicals.

The OLPC project has also inspired a number of other companies including Asus and Everex to develop competing low-cost laptops over the past year. Jepsen estimates that by the end of 2008 there could be as many as 10-12 companies selling low-cost laptop computers. While most of these aren't designed to be as environmentally friendly as the XO laptop, they generally will draw less power than traditional laptops.

About a month ago Jepsen left the OLPC team to start a new for-profit company called Pixel Qi. The goal is to develop commercial versions of the technologies she pioneered. If all goes according to plan we could start to see other laptops incorporating some of the same technologies used in the XO. For example, the XO laptop has a high resolution screen which is easily readable outdoors, and which draws far less power than most LCD displays. That's at least partially because when you're reading a static page of text or looking at a picture with no moving pixels, the computer effectively shuts down many of the parts you're not using to save energy. It'd be amazing to see that screen commercialized and incorporated in other low cost, and even mainstream notebook computers.