The OLPC project has just launched OLPC USA: XO-1 laptop sales at $400 per computer in a “Give 1 Get 1″ program:

Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops – one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home. The devices will reportedly ship before the late December holidays.

via OLPC News

Thoughtfix of TabletBlog has posted another detailed look at the Nokia N800 versus the iPod Touch.

The iPod touch and the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet may seem like apples and oranges (Apples and Nokias?) from a consumer perspective. One is a mobile internet device that happens to play music and videos. The other is a mobile music/video device that happens to have a web browser. The purpose of this article is to accentuate the strengths and weaknesses of each device help people decide what’s right for them. It’s neither a review of the touch nor of the N800. People familiar with both devices don’t seem to want to own both, which is sensible since the functionality overlaps quite a bit. Both, as internet and media devices, are similar in a notable way: neither are phones or intended to replace phones. The fact that both are intended to be a “second device” is the critical commonality. They’re fighting for space in your other pocket.

At the Intel Developers Forum, Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president of ultra mobility at Intel, showed off the new Menlow and the follow-up Moorestown mobile platforms for pocket Internet devices. Could this be the next-gen competition for the iPhone? Or might the iPhone even incorporate the new technology?

Menlow and Moorestown go in a different, and much more Intel-centric, direction. They’re ultra-low-power x86 chips, using Intel’s own instruction set that developers will be familiar with from desktop machines. While these chips aren’t designed to run Windows Vista, Intel asserts that it’ll be easier for developers to port software from other x86 platforms to the new chips as opposed to recoding for ARM. ARM, meanwhile, touts what they say is even lower power usage than the new Intel chips.

Menlow and Moorestown Mobile Internet Devices (MID) will connect to WiMAX, Wi-Fi (802.11 g/n), and 3G networks for total Internet connectivity (at least where 3G and/or WiMAX is installed).

Read (anandtech.com)
Read (pcmag.com)

MontaVista Software announced today that the company has joined the non-profit LiMo Foundation to help LiMo’s mission of increasing the adoption of Linux operating system software in cell phones and other mobile devices.

Leading handset manufacturers such as NEC, Motorola, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, and others have made MontaVista the most widely used provider of Linux software to the mobile telephony market, and the fastest-growing commercial operating system (OS) provider in that market, according to analyst firm VDC. MontaVista Mobilinux provides an embedded Linux operating system optimized for mobile devices and a rich development environment. Mobilinux enables developers and manufacturers to deliver new handsets to consumers more quickly and with greater functionality, fast performance, and battery-extending power management. More than 35 million smartphones, cell phones, and other mobile devices run on MontaVista Mobilinux, far more than any other commercial Linux.

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After 36 hours of reverse engineering, the method for producing the checksum on new iPods has been discovered. You can also get linux support working if that’s what you crave for your shiny new toy.

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Intel plans to announce an open-source project called LessWatts.org, which aims to improve the power efficiency of the Linux operating system and applications.

“LessWatts is about creating a community around saving power on Linux, bringing developers, users, and sysadmins together to share software, optimizations, and tips and tricks.”

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Despite signs that mobile Linux is gaining momentum– such as the launch of Motorola Inc.’s Linux-based Razr2– heated competition, confusion about goals and slow-moving consortiums may be hindering growth.
The LiMo Foundation, the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS) and the Open Source Development Labs’ Mobile Linux Initiative are among the new groups formed over the past couple of years to try to reduce the fragmentation in the mobile Linux market and to encourage interoperability. But at least one mobile Linux vendor is critical of their progress.

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Trolltech today announced Qtopia Phone Edition has been ported to the Neo 1973 mobile phone from Taiwanese manufacturer FIC and open-source software provider OpenMoko. Now, in addition to Trolltech’s Qtopia Greenphone, developers have an additional reference platform and form factor for development and testing of new mobile Qtopia applications.

The company has also announced that the Qtopia Phone Edition will be made completely open source under GPL license.

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The vaunted “$100 laptop” that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers dreamed up for international schoolchildren is becoming a slightly more distant concept. Leaders of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child that was spun out of MIT acknowledged Friday that the devices would cost $188 if mass production, expected to begin this fall, were to start now. The last price the nonprofit had announced was $176; it described $100 as a long-term goal.

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BoingBoing writes, The latest iPods have a cryptographic “checksum” in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn’t exist — like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players. Notice that this has nothing to do with piracy — this is about Apple limiting the choices available to people who buy their iPod hardware.