UMPC Site

Mark Polino is posting his thoughts about Samsung Q1.Here is a nice list of good and bad things of Q1 according to him.

Good The packaging was great. Very high end Apple-like but in Darth Vader black. There was nothing cheesy about the package.

Bad
In the typical slouched on the couch writing position, the Q1 is an odd size to write on in the horizontal, long ways position. It’s better in the vertical except that my unit quit rotating halfway through the weekend. It’s possible something I installed goofed up the rotation but I haven’t figured out what yet but I’m working on it.

Akihabara News published a video of Sony UX50. I couldn’t watch it’s embedded version on the page, it stopped and i reloadedit over and our again. lf you have a good bandwidth) , you can download it over bittorrent. (350 MB) I could have said it’s a bad review, but it’s not a review, it’s just a video consisting UX50. The “reviewer” even says the screen is easily readable, which is not true according to a lot of reviews. But i learned a few things about UX50 : It takes a month to boot, it’s thick, zooming is not smooth as previously heared; it takes a lot of processing power and reviewer really pissed off of bundled software, or as he says countless times, crap.

If you have a good bandwidth and time to kill, watch this as an angry swearing Japanese with a funny accent making a UX50 video.

You may have already seen the News.com story. I have read the story and a lot of the comments on the story on other websites over and over again to make sense. Whole page says two things: Probably new UMPCs will “unfold” with Windows Vista and Microsoft wanted lower prices with first generation. OK, so what? Will new UMPCs with Vista be cheaper? Will they have different hardware? Anything different other than Vista? Story doesn’t say anything.

About the “Microsoft wants lower priced UMPCs” thing. Everybody wants lower priced UMPCs. But everybody wants to go to the moon too : It may be easily done in the next century, but not yet. This is true for UMPCs too. (Not for a century of course) Look at Tabletkiosk eo : Even with Via processors, chipset and only 256 MB RAM, (and defective parts :D) they can sell at only 900$. Yes, they must be profiting, but i don’t think it will be profitable at 700$ - maybe even at 800$.

And about the UMPCs with Vista : All reviewers say the recent UMPCs are not very speedy. UMPCs with C7 processors even slower. And 900$ eo’s have only 256 MB RAM, and others have mostly 512 MB. Vista Beta testers don’t like Vista on 512 MB RAM PCs. Kevin Tofel installed Beta 2 on Samsung Q1 and says XP is faster. Yes, newer drivers and last version will be faster, but not as fast as XP. And already most say UMPCs are not fast.

Vistagami’s will come mostly with 1 GB RAM - another price bump. And to be able to get good speeds, you need a faster processor: But hey, there is no such a thing! Core Solo is not much different from Pentium M. (and they are more expensive) If you go Core Duo, you will need a gas tank for energy.

And for publicity, do you think Vistagami’s will make enough buzz in the shadow of a new, very good OS: long-waited Vista if they will debut together?

Don’t hesistate to comment or discuss, i want to get other perspectives on these.

Lucky Thoughts published a nice video review of Samsung Q1. This is Michael Venini`s first video review, but i liked it. He covered Ports,Battery Life,Games,Notes and Outdoor view with his opinions. Here is the link.

Well, after all, wiiwas right to be suspicious about USB Bus’s being the reason of battery issue of eo. Tabletkiosk sent John Tokash an email about a fix for battery issue. You read the email here. Shortly, the issue as because of hardware ; a set of defective cords / capacitors and users have to send their units back to fix. And these users will get 25% discount on eo accessories.

Kevin C. Tofel got his Q1 and began reviewing. You can watch his live unboxing here (yes, i too think making a video for unboxing is a little bit crazy. ) He discovered Q1’s USB cable has integrated synchronization software. Not a very sophisticated one,cool feature i believe. Interesting thing is i thought about the same thing long ago, why have other manufacturers not made this yet? And even more interestingly, why didn’t we hear this cool feature from other reviewers, bloggers before?

DigitalWorldTokyo published a very very good review of Sony UX50. I congratulate J Mark Lytle, it is good to read a nice review after dozens of crappy ones. You should read Barry’s comment under the review too.

Well, about UX50, it looks like that all my predictions were true : Screen, digitizer, keyboard and battery life are not very good.

Notice that the screen zoomed in 2X. If you zoom that much to be able to use, than the screen isn’t very different than PDA screens.

I had planned to write this review on it but it’s simply too cramped (mainly by the left and right sides of the keyboard slider mechanism) and unresponsive. There’s almost no tactile feedback from keypresses and typing is a real chore. The onscreen handwriting recognition is no substitute either, as PDA fans will attest.

Then there’s the screen. Yes, it’s clear and bright but it’s pretty obvious that 4.5in is never going to be enough. My eyes really hurt after about 15 minutes of viewing the usual gamut of websites and that’s despite almost constant use of the zoom buttons. Moreover, I don’t use glasses or lenses — yet…

On the juice front, the battery life is — as might be expected — not up to scratch. With the Wi-Fi on, two hours was just about all right, but playing a movie with the screen at full brightness and headphones in reduced this to a poor 1.5 hours.

Mark didn’t like its’ weight and form factor very much either.

Finally, the 520g weight of the UX50 is likely to split opinion down the middle. I found it too heavy to sway me from me 900g Toshiba laptop. Why save just 400g but sacrifice a proper keyboard, much larger screen and great battery life?

Both the UX50 and a laptop need to be carried in a protective bag anway — this Vaio clearly isn’t pocketable — so where’s the need for the handheld in that case?

Samsung announced Q1-SSD , Q1 with 32 GB Solid State NAND Flash drive instead of hard-drive with a nice price tag : 2430$. Flash drives are faster, more shock-resistant and have lower power consumption than hard drives - all these features are good for UMPCs. But as you noticed, they are very expensive - at least for now. They used to be even more expensive a few years ago. Q1’s “instant-on” (20 seconds) multimedia feature will be more “instant” in Q1-SSD.
I will look forward to Windows’s cold boot,wake up times and battery life tests of Q1-SSD.

MobileTechReview published Samsung Q1 Review. Not much different from LisaG’s Samsung Q1 daily impressions i previously posted, but worth reading : There are some good points:

Con: The resolution isn’t consistently supported by 3rd party or even Microsoft’s own software: dialog boxes will sometimes run off the bottom of the screen, requiring user-prowess and judicious use of the res switcher button. Price is high when the device has to compete with higher spec-d traditional notebooks (that’s the price you pay for miniaturization). Pen is a little cheesy.

Tabletkiosk’s UK partner, PocketPC Solutions , released a Mic Driver update for eo. Here is the link.

Ctitanic and John Tokash tested it and reported that it’s working.