We are excited about moving to the new XO-4 laptops for upcoming deployments. XO-4 uses power efficient processor based on ARM technology and has expanded storage space. It has the same sturdy design as its predecessors that have earned a reputation for durability and withstood heavy usage by students in rural schools in Nepal.

In mid-February, OLPC sent us an XO-1.75 which is based on same architecture as XO-4 for testing purposes. We were worried to learn that there was no public support of Flash for this architecture since OLE Nepal has invested heavily in Flash. We have over 500 interactive learning modules develop ed on Flash that children in Nepal use to learn various concepts. Not only that, other educational activities in our digital library, E-Pustakalaya, like the British Council’s “Learn English Kids” and “E-Learning for Kids” are also based on Flash.

(We tried other platforms to develop on, but Flash provided us an environment where we could quickly create interactive activities. Later when we learned that Flash was not being supported by many vendors, we were well on our way to build our framework on it and it was too late to switch to other platforms)

Fortunately, with the help of OLPC we managed to run Flash on XO-1.75. This was a major relief for us. Besides that, the performance of new XOs is extremely better compared to the previous versions. Now we are setting up new build system for new XOs which will be deployed this summer.