Rats. Just when we thought that someone had figured out how to make a winning UMPC configuration for consumers, out comes a review to pan it. While the
Samsung Q1EX sounds good on paper with its 7-inch resistive touchpanel with 1,024 x 600 resolution, 1.2GHz VIA Nano processor, 4.5-hour battery, and $775 price tag;
Laptop Mag was unimpressed when it came to go-time. Unfortunately,
Laptop found text entry to be too much of a chore thanks to the loss of the thumbpad used on previous Q1-series UMPCs and the lack of a digitizer that severely impacts the unit's ability to accurately recognize handwriting under XP Tablet Edition. Boot times were slow and battery life was poor at just two hours compared to the 4.5 hours stated. Sure, you can add a dock with keyboard (pictured) and optional 6-cell battery (bringing the price to $977), but at that point, you'd be wise to look at the latest in
wee netbooks offering bigger screens, the same power, and longer battery life at half the price.
posted March 12th 2009 8:46AM
I wonder why manufacturers still bother to build these things - it's rather obvious that the market doesn't need them (apart from a few industrial uses) between cheaper netbooks and smaller smartphones...
I like them!..and that side picture really clears things up for me....:|
I am a big fan of the UMPC I own 2 of them. But I have to agree with the new netbooks they are becoming useless. I think the perfect small form PC would be a netbook 9 or 10 inch with the tablet functions and flip screen. I think that is the direction things are moving to I hope by next year that a good one will be on the market.
A UMPC is not a netbook. I use an UMPC as an eReader. I can't use a netbook for that when a netbook has a keyboard which sticks out infront of the screen. A UMPC is mainly a screen which you can hold like a book.
It's extremely fiddly and requires too much desk space. How is this portable?
Was always going to get bad press taking the thumb keyboard away, really dumb.