The Q1
My boss recently purchased a Samsung Q1 for development purposes and he let me play around with it. My first though of the device was “great another ‘toy’ to pile on my desk.” I already have my laptop with extra monitor, iPod, personal phone, work phone (Sprint PPC6700), a box running subversion amongst other things, and another new work phone to test our product (Treo 700P). So now I have this Q1 to work with. It’s not a bad device after you play around with it but I don’t know if I’d buy one my self.
For starters a $1,000 price tag is a little high. For that much money I could buy a halfway decent laptop and get just as much use out of the thing if not more. The whole idea of a tablet PC is nice but why would you want a PC that is larger than a PDA and smaller than a tablet? A PDA can be clipped onto your belt or even fit in your pocket if you have big pockets. On the flip side a Tablet PC usually comes with a carrying case that you can strap over your shoulder and carry with you, just like a laptop. The UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) didn’t fit either bill and I found it to be a hassle to care with me once I was done with it. It’s like carrying a book around with you when you don’t have a backpack. After a while it gets annoying.
The display was sharp and responsive however I didn’t like the fact that the resolution really doesn’t get any better than 1024×680. Yeah, that’s right I said 680. I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t really dived into the device all that much so it might be able to support higher resolutions but I doubt it. Aside from the display, the onscreen keyboard is just like the PDA keyboard(s) and I assume a table PC’s not having used one myself. It, like the others, took me some time to get used to writing in free hand. I knew I had bad handwriting but yesh! Part of the reason was the stylus I think. It’s not your normal stylus, this one has an extra tip on the end. It made it easy to point and click but was a pain to write with.
As far as applications go, it handled most everything just fine. I didn’t take it through a stress test and bombard it like Tom’s Hardware but I’m sure it would have done fine. One thing that I did fine amusing was when I tried to play one of the games that came installed, the screen resolution could not handle the game. I couldn’t maximize the game so I was stuck playing a game in a 600×800 window on a 1024×680 screen. Nice.
