Has the Samsung Q1 Finally Found Its Niche?

Later last year I was fortunate enough to get my gadget-hungry hands on one of the year’s biggest consumer PC releases: a UMPC (that’s Ultra Mobile PC to you and me), the fruit of Microsoft’s much-hyped ‘Origami’ project.

 
Samsung had been the first to step up to the plate and adopt this new format in the guise of the Samsung Q1. The first thing you’ll notice about the Q1 is that it’s small, black and unmistakably sexy – around the size of a VHS video but a somewhat heavier and about £800 more expensive. The next thing you’ll spy that it doesn’t have a keyboard – instead it is equipped with a touch sensitive screen of fairly good quality along with a simple plastic PDA-style stylus. Finally, you’d be excused for recognising it simply as a slightly overgrown PMP (for the unitiated, that’s Portable Media Player), but that would be doing it an injustice. In fact, it’s an (almost) full-blown Windows machine, running Windows XP Tablet Edition, and with some modestly satisfying hardware specs under its bonnet.
 
Now, like most other people when faced with a new technology, I did some research: reading reviews and catching a piece on UK Channel 5′s excellent Gadget Show, all agreed it was a pretty fun toy, but all sat on the fence about its usefulness. Was the Q1 (or indeed, the UMPC) filling a hole in the consumer market that didn’t actually exist? What exactly would people use it for? Now, personally, I can utterly understand this: if people want a handy gadget upon which to watch last night’s Eastenders/Lost on the train to work then frankly there’s more mobile/slimline and significantly cheaper offerings available (the Samsung Q1 retails at a cool £799.99 including VAT in the UK). If you’re looking for something handy to edit a few Word documents/Excel spreadsheets and catch up with some emails on the train/tube/bus then once again the Q1 is just a little too big (in fact, the lack of keyboard and the infantile and fiddly ‘thumbkeys’ means that any text entry is more of a long-winded chore rather than quick convenience) and, once again, there are more accessible pieces of technology on the market (e.g. Blackberry, Smartphones) which can do the all of above at a fraction of the price. Yes, you can plug in a keyboard via USB or via the inbuilt Bluetooth, but why on earth wouldn’t you just buy a small laptop for a little bit more (or even a little less if you shop around)?
 
So, given the above evidence alone, I’d have to agree with the critics… but, at last I think I may finally have found a niche for the Q1:
 
One of my clients is a health and safety consultant who travels the country giving lectures and training courses which inevitably means Powerpoint presentations. A couple of years ago, he made the good move of buying a very portable yet capable projector and the bad move of buying an unecessarily huge laptop. Not being the slightest bit computer savvy, the laptop was the most powerful machine that the eager salesperson in PC World could convince him to part with his cash for. This Sony machine was a monster, a desktop replacement instead of the simple Powerpoint presentation player that he needed. After over two years of lugging this bulk around, enough was enough – he needed either a slimmer, less bulky solution or slipped-disc surgery. Opting for the former option, we ascertained his requirement for a replacement, the bottom line being this – he doesn’t need to check e-mails, write or edit documents (he has office support for this); all he needs to do is to play Powerpoint presentations and the occasional DVD (again, as part of his training packages) through a projector.
 
Starting with the projector, some claim to have inbuilt ‘Powerpoint Presentation Player Compatibility’ via an SD (or CF) card slot. Ideal, I thought, one piece of hardware instead of two – however, after looking into what this actually meant, it appears that an application on a PC has to read-in a Powerpoint presentation and convert it into a series of JPEGs. These are in turn be copied to an SD Card and played in sequence on the projector. For some, this may suffice, but for my client it wasn’t quite good enough, as some of the key illustrative animated effects in the slides would be lost, as would the ability to play the training DVD’s. So, back to the drawing board.
 
A laptop provided him fundamentally with much more that he actually needed (he claimed never even having used the keyboard on his current laptop), and to find a model small enough for him would have been particularly expensive (e.g. Sony TX series). It was around now that the idea of the UMPC began to spring to my mind. Being an ultra portable Windows PC with a touch screen (easy to use for the novice) and having an HD15 VGA output for use with his projector it seemed to meet his needs. There was need to splash out for Microsoft Office, instead we simply downloaded the free Microsoft Powerpoint player software from microsoft.com. As for the DVDs he plays to his training delegates, whereas the Samsung Q1 has no inbuilt CD/DVD capability, there were several options: purchase a relatively expensive additional USB DVD drive or simply to copy the DVD onto the ample inbuilt HDD from another machine – alternatively, there are numerous ‘virtual cd’ freeware utilities available which would do the job admirably. If the client was to use a great number of DVDs or wish to change his viewing selection more frequently, I’d be more inclined to suggest a USB device, but as he had only two which he reused time and time again, I felt it was a workable compromise. As stated before, he doesn’t have much of a requirement for connectivity to his office other than via a mobile phone – if e-mail on the go were to become essential later on, I’d rather suggest a Blackberry or similar dedicated e-mailer/phone rather than upgrading the UMPC.
 
Yes, there are some irks and quirks with the Q1 – some applications get very fussy indeed about needing input from keyboard and it can be extremely fiddly to ‘get out’ of some situations without resorting to rebooting the system. I’ve come across instances where, upon plugging in the projector, the screen rescales and the mouse cursor is a good few inches out of sync with where you touch on the touch screen with your stylus. There are one or two usablilty ‘features’ which I’m sure could be improved on a subsequent model (Q2 anyone?). Finally, battery life isn’t as great as was hoped and it’s not particularly speedy compared with most desktop/laptop systems these days.
 
However, overall, he is one very happy and less luggage-lumbered customer who seems to have found a huge benefit from the strengths of the UMPC. Yes, the Q1 may struggle to find its pigeon hole amongst the plethora of other consumer formats available, but for a professional traveling salesperson, trainer or presenter with modest requirements beyond that it’s an excellent compromise.

Comments - do you have a Q1? Do you disagree with any of the above? Can you think of another killer application for the Q1, or a viable alternative to its use above? Please do leave a comment.