Samsung Q1 UMPC Review 6/6
Bluetooth 28 Sep 2006

Pricing from various vendors >>>

Conclusion (Pricing)

The Samsung Q1 UMPC is is basically an enhanced Tablet PC. In fact, many manufacturers have tried ways to enhanced their tablet pcs in the past but failed miserably. IF you look back in our reviews, there is a ECS EZ-30D which can do a similar job.

As we have already discussed before, the Q1 offers you the freedom and flexibility to go anywhere and do everything. It is a bridge between a regular PC, PDA and a multimedia playstation.

The performance of the unit can be said to be good. In fact, we were quite surprised by the performance of the Intel® Celeron M 900MHZ. We also did a test on its USB port and found it to sustain an average of 26MB/s which is very impressive. This is important as you would mostl likely be using an external USB drive like me as the 40GB will definitely run out very fast. You will also need that to pair up with an external DVD RW drive if you want to playback DVDs directly as the Q1 doesn't come with any. Two USB ports also seem to be a little be too little, you might need a USB 4 port hub if you intend to use an external USB keyboard. It really drive me crazy when i was trying to do some text editing on it using a stylus! The internal I/O is pretty ok too with the HDD sustaining an average of 21MB/s.

In terms of video playback, the image quality is acceptable for a 7" screen. If you don't like it, you can always plug it to a LCD or CRT. The playback of the multimedia clips did not hog the system at all. The sound level is also loud enough for your friends crowding you to enjoy the movie together. It might be good to incorporate a webcam on the unit so that users can see each other using MSN or SKYPE.

Weighing just 779g and 24.5mm deep, it is very portable and will definitely appeal to gadget people like me. One thing for sure, the Q1 probably needs a higher capacity battery to run longer than the average 2.5hrs. It is known that a newer version of the Q1 will incorporate a Solid State Hard Drive. That will probably speed things up during disk access.

Overall, I am quite impressed with this gadget. With this I give it a Gold Award.

Pricing Info

Pros :

• Lightweight

• Portable

• USB performance is excellent

• Bluetooth, WIFI

Cons :

• No holding rubber grip on the side

• No WebCam

• No external DVD drive

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