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Hello, I'm David Pogue. This week, no comedy. No costumes, no characters. Sorry about that.

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It's because I saw something that's so cool, I just think showing it to you will be enough.

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It's the famed $100 laptop, now called the XO Laptop. This is it.

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The company behind this is called One Laptop Per Child, laptop.org.

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And the idea behind this is to make it so inexpensive that poor countries can afford to buy them for their students,

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their educationally deprived students, in the hundreds of thousands or the millions.

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But what's really interesting is they're actually going to sell this thing to Americans for two weeks starting November 12th.

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To me, that makes it fair game for a review.

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Well, first of all, I have to say, for its mission, it's pretty amazing.

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Gamepad controller, stereo speakers, built-in video camera.

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Hello, little camcorder module.

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The hardest thing about it is figuring out how to open it.

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Most people fiddle around with it like this, but in fact, what you do is you raise the antennas and then you open it like this.

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Note how clever. The guts of the machine are in the screen, not in the pad.

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And nothing happens if you get water on here. Thanks.

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It's also dust-proof, completely sealed, and drop-proof.

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Now, think about the environments where this thing is going to be used.

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Power is going to be an issue.

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So already, it's got a six-hour battery that'll last 24 hours if you're just reading.

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And oh, by the way, here's how you read.

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Keep up, reader.

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It's also available with a $12 solar panel that's only one foot square.

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It's nonetheless enough to power the thing or to recharge it when it's off.

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What's especially cool about this battery, though, is it costs only $10 to replace,

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and it'll last for 2,000 recharge cycles.

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For reference, that's about four times more recharge cycles than your laptop.

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Look what happens in sunlight.

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You can turn the backlighting all the way down to save power,

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and you get this incredible, easy-to-read black-and-white mode that's like reading a newspaper.

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One of the coolest things is the heavy emphasis on programming.

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There are three different programming environments of different degrees of sophistication on this thing.

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What's really even cooler is if you press this keystroke,

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you reveal the source code of whatever programming you're using.

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It's in Python, so you can actually study the way the laptop software itself was written

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and even make changes to it.

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Although, yes, there is a restore button that brings back the original in case you really make a mess of things.

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Of course, the laptops get onto the Internet, Wi-Fi, very easily.

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But if there's no Internet, they can also communicate wirelessly within the classroom

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via something called a mesh network, an instant self-configuring network.

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And all the programs are collaborative, so the games, the drawing program, the word processor,

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all of you can collaborate together on the same...

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What? Oh.

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Now, as you may have heard, the $100 laptop did not, in fact, come in at a price of $100.

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It's $188 and sinking.

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If you want to buy one, you have to order it in that two-week November window.

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You pay $400. It's give one, get one.

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So you get one and a tax deduction, and then the company sends one to a poor kid in another country on your behalf.

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Nice gesture.

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You can see why the bloggers are a little bit snarky about this laptop.

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There's no CD or DVD drive. There's no hard drive.

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The processor is very slow to start up and to switch programs,

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although it's perfectly adequate once you're in the program.

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But think again. This laptop is not intended for the snarky bloggers.

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This laptop is intended for poor kids in other countries.

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And for that, I say it's amazing.

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Thank you.