Sun-friendly laptop screen specialist Pixel Qi is set to release its new replaceable notebook screens later this spring.
The company's Mary Lou Jepsen's announced on the Pixel Qi blog that there will be DIY kits for replacing your own laptop screen with the sunlight-friendly Pixel Qi screen.
OLPC experience
"One of the reasons I'm personally committed to doing this goes back to my One Laptop per Child experience and girls in a poor rural part of Nigeria who helped us test the early beta-laptop builds," notes Jepsen.
"In their school they had slanted desks bolted to benches with 4-5 kids per desk/bench combo. When any kid fidgeted or bumped all the laptops would fall on the concrete floors.
"The laptops were designed to be rugged and didn't break usually, but in this early build one of the cables to the touchpad/keyboard was 1mm too short and could become "unseated". This meant the keyboard and the touchpad would no longer work unless something was done.
Easy as changing a lightbulb
She adds that local "Ministers of Education had a tough time believing that these girls could fix the hardware… they would visit – to see it with their own eyes – and start thinking differently about maintenance of hardware. We kept preaching that ownership was the best way to assure maintenance."
So if you are worried about changing your laptop screen, the message from Pixel Qi is – don't be, if 11-year-old Nigerian girls can do it, so can you!
In fact, in Jepsen's own words: "It's only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: it's basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That's it. It's a 5 minute operation."
Pixel Qi's screens are set to be a key component in Notion Ink's forthcoming Adam tablet PC/e-reader device, which is gaining a lot of interest as a potential competing device to Apple's iPad.
Via Pixel Qi
