OLPC available on Amazon

Before you get confused, the headline refers to the online retailer rather than the South American river system. According to the BBC, the OLPC project has teamed up with Amazon to push the Get 1 Give 1 scheme where consumers can choose to buy two of the $200 laptops - one for themselves and one for donation to a child in need.

The G1 G1 scheme was launched last November - but as with many aspects of the OLPC scheme it didn't go smoothly so is being re-launched this November with Amazon's help.

It will be interesting to see how the OLPC XO fares given the arrival of the netbook - such as the Asus Eee - a device that can probably trace its evolution directly to the OLPC ( in fact another low cost machine the Intel Classmate uses much of the same Red Hat code to run its OS as the XO).

Also the development of the touchscreen XO-2 is also worth keeping any eye on.

For more on the OLPC and energy efficient PCs check out this group test:

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000323,39363065,00.htm