
I've said this before about the Pixel Qi panel in the XO-1. > the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software) I'm 100% in agreement that's what "saviour" projects like MIT Asia, OLPC have all ended up being. I'm so glad to see others speaking out about this. > Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects This severely compromised the effectiveness of the project.

Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects, rather than as a means to a specific educational/humanitarian goal. Given that these were probably the two most useful apps on the system, the system felt pretty disjointed overall. The same was true of the web browser, which was a thin shell around Firefox. While they did thankfully ship an office productivity suite, it was literally just OpenOffice it looked completely different from the rest of the OS, and was poorly integrated.
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However, the project placed very little emphasis on the development of boring-but-practical end-user software for the device, like educational games and tools, media viewing tools (like book readers and audio/movie players), or course management software.

the end result was that a lot of time and effort went into designing/redesigning unique features which didn't provide a lot of value to end users. Additionally, the project placed a lot of emphasis on unusual, experimental hardware features which they were unable to fully utilize, such as the infamous hand crank (never fully shipped), an unusual hybrid capacitive/resistive touchpad (resistive features were never used), the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software), mesh networking (software was never fully implemented), hardware buttons for software features that were never implemented (particularly "view source").

Developing and supporting this software consumed a lot of time at the Foundation. The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential high-effort software initiatives, like developing their own BIOS replacement, desktop interface, UI framework, and nonstandard file manager. I was peripherally involved with this project when it was new, and my biggest takeaways would be that:
