It’s far more rugged than the ASUS, has the mesh networking and separate networking processor, has the duel mode screen to be able to be used in lighting conditions where back-lit screens are unreadable, and ships with an OS that tries to be minimal and thus easier on battery life (heading towards tickless kernel — and has hardware that wakes up and interrupts CPU rather than ever requiring the CPU poll). Running the resource intensive GUI of either Xandros or XP seems like a very bad idea.

I like the fact I can put my XO into e-Book mode and read a PDF file where I can treat it like a book for the day (IE: leave it on, and have the battery last the day rather than only an hour or two).

The OLPC project hopes to eventually be able to focus on their educational project (One Per Child learning philosophy) and educational software, and not have to produce hardware. Will the marketplace eventually meet that demand? Thus far I wouldn’t trade my XO for any of the other offerings, and none that claim to compete with the OLPC project (Like the Intel Classmate) come close.

I just bought an Asus gaming laptop, and it’s a tank. It’s large, heavy, but it will play games with the graphics settings wide open. It’s alot more robust than most average users would want, and I really can’t see myself using it on a flight or anything. It cooks at nearly 200 degrees when under full load, and a full battery only lasts about an hour and a half playing something like Half-Life 2.

It is, however, more portable than my desktop.

I find this Eee PC very intriguing.