Hasta La Gadget!

Back in May, One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte announced the organization’s plan to launch a touchscreen tablet version of its already ambitious XO laptop. The plan was to introduce the tablet by CES 2011, for less than $100.

Negroponte this week announced that the organization won’t be able to hit that deadline. “We’re going to miss CES by 45 days,” he said in an interview. “We’ll have something, middle of February.”

The problem, he said, is an inability to find the right material for the education device. “The issue had been finding an unbreakable material–which may not be plastic, by the way, it may be some flavor of glass,” he said.

And while OLPC is focusing on forthcoming tablet, the original XO laptop won’t be going away any time soon. “The current laptop and the tablet will co-exist for at least some period of time,” Negroponte told a reporter. “It is unclear to us if the haptic version of the tablet keyboard is going to be sufficient enough for you to use it as a general purpose computer.”