Hasta La Gadget!

The folks from One Laptop Per Child were on-hand at this year’s CES, courtesy of the organization’s hardware partner, Marvell. I had the opportunity to chat up OLPC’s chief technology officer, Edward McNierey, who was showcasing a forthcoming version of the company’s flagship XO laptop.

The new system, due out later this year, if the organization’s first to be built around an ARM chip. In light of Microsoft’s announcement earlier this week of an new version of Windows capable or running on an ARM processor, I had to ask whether the company had any plans to partner with Microsoft on a future system.

McNierey joked that the company had finally managed to create a version of hardware that couldn’t run a Windows OS, adding that the organization’s head, Nicholas Negroponte had predicted that Microsoft would soon issue an arm compatible OS, prior to the recent announcement.