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There is no e-mail client but gmail works fine as well as a number of other web mail clients. I believe there is a tinymail client running around but it never became more than a proof of concept. It is slow by current standards but what we though was fast a couple of years ago is slow today too so there it is evident that slower does not equal useless. The XO trades off speed for better power consumption and less expense. Applications take a bit to start up but once they are up they run fairly zippy. Certain web pages with a lot of data will be slow to render but overall the performance isn't bad. The screen is a 7.5” dual-mode TFT display with an amazing (200 DPI), 1200(H) × 900(V) resolution in reflective, black and white mode and approximately 800(H) × 600(V) in color mode. This makes it even nicer to surf the web with than even some modern lcd screens, especially in the sunlight where normal TFT's can't go. In black and white mode the resolution approaches that of print. Storage is 1 gig of flash where about 300meg or so is taken by the OS and applications. There is 256 megs of memory. I'm not sure what you mean by graphics apps. Files are not part of the XO paradigm. You work in activities which has data associated with it in the Journal. Every time you exit an activity the state is saved in the Journal and you can resume what you were doing later. In fact you don't close activities like you do applications, you stop them and then resume them to pick up where you left off. Journal entries can be copied to a pen drive to support legacy devices. It has a paint program and you could technically install and run the gimp fine on it though it hasn't been ported to the Sugar interface. Sure it could do podcasts. Encoding video is a bit of a stressful activity so quality is an issue there but audio is really good. Video just needs some more tweaking. Pictures are a lot better than what you find in most phones. The last picture in this article looks like it was taken from the XO. It's got command line ftp support which can be yum installed. It is based off of Fedora Core 7 and will have all the same apps though that is not to say they will all work. The XO works with a package format called an Activity. Activities are self contained and can be installed by clicking on one from a web page. Not sure on the frequency of stable updates. There are new development builds every day. The base system gets updated via rsync diffs and manifest checking for integrity. Remember this is a targeted device not a general purpose computer so things are done differently from a regular distro. That being said, with some hacking you can get a regular distro up and have it work like a general purpose computer but then you lose things like much of the power management work, mesh networking and control of the screen backlight. It runs pretty well with XFCE though I have also had GNOME running on mine. Battery life varies on how you use it but there is potential of getting it up to a full day of use. Right now I am hearing four to seven hours on average but you will have to go to OLPC for exact figures. More work on power management is ongoing. The batteries themselves are built to be able to be recharged more times than conventional laptop batteries. More info can be found at the laptop.org wiki http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home. Have fun.

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