Samsung misses the mark with Q1 Origami

Stan Beer
Sunday, 07 May 2006 14:25

Your IT - Home IT

As expected the Samsung Q1 has not exactly opened to rave reviews from the critics. In fact, all round they seem to have panned it.

As many have critics have pointed out, including yours truly, the Samsung Q1 is underpowered yet too power hungry, small to but too big to be wearable, less functional than low-end notebooks but more expensive.

Not being a tablet PC fan anyway, I couldn’t see what the fuss was all about with the new Samsung device. However, it seems that I’m not alone.

The Samsung Q1 costs around $1100, which is enough to buy a pretty decent laptop. However, it has no keyboard, no DVD drive, an underpowered processor, a tiny screen (7-inch), hads limited battery life and is too big to fit in your pocket. Sure it has a pretty decent amount of memory (512M of RAM) and storage (40G hard drive). It also has Bluetooth, WiFi and two USB ports.

As I noted in my previous article, mobile workers in transit want to type documents, read them and maybe watch a DVD in their spare time. For that a nice compact notebook serves the purpose well. If they’re in the street or parked in the car, they may want retrieve emails, SMS messages or make a phone call. For that, smartphone device like a Treo or Blackberry is perfect. A field sales representative may want to check stock items in a store against what’s in the inventory database and generate an order to replenish the store’s stock. A pocket PC is the most popular type of device for that type of application.

With no DVD drive, keyboard or decent sized screen, and just over two hours battery life, one wonders what applications the Samsung Q1 hopes to address that aren’t already being handled. Reading online newspapers perhaps? I doubt whether being able to download newspapers and read them on a seven inch screen will do it for people who are being asked to shell out $1100.

For most people, their notebooks, smartphones, or PDA will continue to do the jobs they were designed for. It seems the Samsung Q1 is a device without an application that can’t be handled better by something else which is cheaper and more practical.