The BETT education technology show at London’s Olympia was heaving today, suggesting that education may be one of the few sectors of the IT industry that isn’t yet suffering as a result of the economic meltdown.

Few stands, however, were attracting as much attention as the ones sporting Intel’s new Classmate PCs. NEC’s version of the Classmate is called the Otomo, and we managed to get our hands on the device for a few minutes on the BETT showfloor.

As we reported yesterday, the child-friendly laptop sports a new design that allows you to swivel the screen from the traditional laptop configuration into a tablet PC. A built-in accelerometer rotates the screen depending on which up way the tablet is being held – whether that be landscape or portrait – although it was certainly a little temperamental on  the pre-release version that we had our hands on.

Intel has designed a chunky software interface to sit on top of the Windows XP operating system, so that pupils can merely jab at a button labelled ‘internet’ rather than scour the Start menu for Internet Explorer and wreak merry havoc in the Control Panel they found listed underneath. Clever design ensures that when kids lean their palm on the screen to write with the stylus, the palm press isn’t recognised as an input.

Though not a fully-ruggedised laptop, the Otomo certainly feels capable of withstanding the bumps and scrapes of playground life, with rubberised edges, splash-proof keyboard and a sturdy, extendable handle to hold the reasonably lightweight device by. We await the first newspaper report of a playground bully lamping his victim with a vicious swing of a Classmate laptop with uneasy anticipation.

NEC’s David Newbould assured us the laptop had been drop tested from 1m, although NEC’s literature claims a mere 50cm. Either way, we’d put £10 on it surviving an inadvertent freefall from a classroom desk.

Teacher in control

The most impressive part of the Classmate PC isn’t the hardware itself, but the teacher’s management software, which can be used to exert complete control over a classroom of networked Otomo laptops. The teacher can see what a child is doing on their PC without leaving their desk, simply by clicking on the pupil’s name. The teacher can broadcast a lesson to the entire class, or allow a child to share their screen with the group, allowing the child to present what they’ve been working on. No more standing at the front of the class and mumbling from a sheet of A4.

If the little swines are too pre-occupied with tapping away at their screens instead of listening to the teacher at the front, Sir or Miss can “silence” the entire class’s laptops at the touch of a button, which both mutes the Otomo and blacks out the screen at the same time. Feel the power.

The Otomo laptops can also be supplied with a “recharge cabinet”, a trolley that can be used to recharge the laptops when the kids have finished with them at the end of the day. The cabinet’s also networked, so software updates can be applied overnight, rather than disturbing class time. Pupils can also take the laptops home, with anti-theft software disabling a stolen laptop if it doesn’t connect to the school server at set times.     

NEC has yet to set final pricing for the Otomo, but NEC’s Newbould estimated a unit price of between £300-£400. That’s certainly not cheap in the netbook era, but would I want my kids to be taught on such a system? Absolutely.