Mary Lou Jespen, the XO Laptop designer and OLPC’s CTO before leaving to found Pixel Qi, has grand ambitions for her mythical $75 laptop. The company is working on a laptop that will be able to run on for 20 to 40 hours on a single battery charge. Sounds like magic, but they assure us it is just old fashioned science.

The laptop will boast incredible efficiency, thanks to an LCD that can switch to a monochrome view to conserve energy. She offers no concrete details other than that regarding the innovation but we should be on the lookout when they drop sometime during the second half of next year.

The OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, laptop will be heading to the hands of consumers in both America and Europe on November 17th. Americans and residents of 27 EU nations will be able to pick up the XO laptop at a cost of about £268 / €313 at Amazon. For each purchase, the manufacturer will donate another laptop to a child in a developing nation. Think of it as a two for one for a worthy cause.

This version of the OLPC runs on the Sugar OS, and not XP.

This would be filed squarely in the "duh" department if we were talking about sugar, the stuff that makes candy taste so good. However, we are talking about the Linux-based Sugar UI. That probably wouldn’t make candy taste so good. We could try though.

An editor at Cnet gave his 8 year old daughter the choice between an OLPC XO laptop running Windows XP and one running the Sugar UI. She chose Sugar. Ok, this isn’t exactly the scientific method but the Sugar interface certainly makes more sense than that dreary ’ole XP interface.

Speaking of, Amazon’s "Give One, Get One" program will be limited to the Linux UI. So that works out, considering the kiddies like it so much.

In other news, kids prefer cute puppies to poisonous spiders.

One Laptop per Child Foundation’s initial cost estimate is way off. Instead of their touted $100, it is closer to $188.

In Uruguay, it is more like $205 and that would be 73% of Nigeria’s entire government income.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is aiming to have American XO retail sales by this Christmas — the foundation is planning on selling the $100 laptop for $350 or more. The real figure is not known because it wants consumer sales to subsidize shipping these laptops to developing countries.

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s rugged XO laptop could initially sell for just $350, or twice its production cost, although the group is also considering a $525 price tag, said OLPC chief technology officer Mary Lou Jepsen.

They seem to be hoping that this will be this season’s must-have holiday toy.