UMPC Explorers! | Ultranauts.com

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Nice little bit of marketing from the folks who brought us the UMPC Pro.

No it’s not a misprint. The title is lifted from Alexme’s forum post on the Origami Projects forum. He’d like a Q1 Ultimate, that is, his current Q1P with a few new features. Features that probably should have been there from the beginning. Features that would make it the Ultimate UMPC for him.

I have to agree with Alexme’s feature requests. They are incredibly reasonable and Samsung should have been able to deliver them. I suggest you take a look at Alexme’s post and add your own Q1 must have features.

Fake Steve Jobs has been exposed. Fake James Kendrick has exposed himself. Fake Steve Balmer is still a mystery but not as funny as fake Steve Jobs. Large parts of Pamela Anderson have been fake for years and Kevin Tofel picks this point in time to take on take on fake UMPC’s. He argues the hippie love theory of UMPC’s that anything that wants to be a UMPC can be one. That the definition is not important any more.

I disagree. I’m not arguing for a Champagne like definition of UMPC’s (if it’s not from Champagne, France you must call it sparkling something or other) but I think that some definition is important. Yes there are lots of UMPC like devices out there. An expansive definition includes the iPhone and the Nokia n800. But if someone claimed the Nokia n800 was a “Tablet PC”, the community would scream that it didn’t meet the definition of a Tablet PC. The Tablet PC community has worked hard to establish their definition.

Why is the definition important? Picture this conversation:

“What’s that?”
“It’s a Nokia n800 UMPC”
“Can I do all my normal computing tasks with it?
“No but you can do web browsing and email anywhere.”

Now one more potential UMPC user is misinformed. They see the UMPC as a Windows Mobile style device instead of a full PC and write off the whole category.

As for the iPhone, with a nod to Fake Steve Jobs, no hardcore Apple fan is going to call an iPhone a UMPC. If Apple doesn’t want to join the club leave them out! Real Steve Jobs still has a Newton shoved so far up his butt that we may never see a tablet style PC from Apple. So be it.

There is a part of me that does want to dump the UMPC definition entirely and lump all Windows based UMPC’s in with Tablet PC’s as one big category of portable computers with pens. Across the spectrum you can get touch, outdoor screens, keyboards, big, little and in between screens; big, little and in between prices. The common element is the pen, the tablet bits in windows and the ability to complete your normal work with it.

The big question in my mind is if the UMPC category is as big a flop as the media claims it is, why is everyone trying to claim to be a UMPC? We’ve seen a lot of fakes. How about some reality in the UMPC space?

Forbes Editor Revealed as Fake Steve Jobs

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As several folks are reporting, the venerable Q1 is back on Tablet PC Review’s list of the top 10 Tablet PC’s. Even better its at number 7, not sneaking in under the wire when no one was looking.

I must admit to being jealous of Perry’s Motion LE1700 when I saw that he had gotten a unit. Rat Bas%$#@ came to mind. But then I thought about it. I still take my Q1 to places I probably wouldn’t take a larger unit. And it’s so freakin’ light.

The old Q1 continues to hang in there. If you stick 2 gigs of ram inside it does quite well. I had some SQL work to do today that returned some good sized record sets (tens of thousands of records) and the Q1 held up well. Results weren’t instantaneous but certainly acceptable.

So Motion or Allegiance, I’ll happily take an LE1700 review unit but for my day to day work, I’m sticking with the Q1.

Lots of sites have Samsung’s press release on the Q1 Ultra but it seems that you can get one for as little as $799. Gottabemobile has a full breakdown of all the models so I’ll direct you there.

The primary difference between units is processor (for the lowest model), hard drive size, OS version and built in HSDPA. Not counting what should be an ultra expensive SSD version, you’ll pay about twice the intro price for a business machine with an 80 gig HD, Vista Business, built in HSDPA and an Intel A110 processor vs. and A100.

The mid range unit at $1,199 get you the Intel A110 processor, 60gig hd, Vista Home Premium but not HSDPA.

All of the units have a built in 1 gig of ram. Kudos to Samsung for that! Also kudos for the 4.5 hr battery life. Even if you’re stretching that’s double the original Q1. I’m a little perplexed about XP tablet as the OS on the low end version. I know Vista home doesn’t have the tablet pieces but I wouldn’t be buying XP for any tablet after using the Vista tablet bits.

This is a price point that going to cause some problems for other manufacturers. Yes it’s somewhat artificially low, but Samsung is still going to beat others over the head with it. The Q1 Ultra is a huge leap forward in a year (with a couple more models in between as well!). Nice work Samsung, now my wife is going to want one of these to replace her Averatec!

I got the Ram suction cup mount for the Q1 a little over a week ago and I have to say that I’m impressed. Despite being hard to buy, it was dead simple to assemble. (Even though there is a “kit” part number you have to buy each of the five parts separately and you have to buy from a dealer, many of which only take phone orders. GPS City was great for online ordering and had all the parts.)

At the risk of being sued by trained monkeys, a trained monkey with a Phillips screwdriver could put this together. It’s really hard to mess up.

Every part is high quality and much better in person than the photos that appear on the website. The suction cup is not a 90’s “Baby on board” sign holder kind of thing. It’s more like the old super glue commercials where they held a truck above a guy’s head. This something you could play spider man stuck to building holding Kirsten Dunst with. (Hey, I fit Kirsten Dunst into a UMPC post. That should generate some traffic!)

Seriously, this is an industrial strength suction cup with a lock and release lever to activate/deactivate the suction connection. No peeling at this with your fingertips.

The actually Q1 cradle is very sturdy. It’s not going to break taking the Q1 in and out. I was so impressed I did something foolish. I stuck the Ram mount to a tile in our kitchen, inserted Q1 and left it over night. If it had fallen, I would be writing a UMPC eulogy. It didn’t wiggle.

The addition of the Ram mount, restores the Q1 as the primary media machine for me. (The Samsung Blackjack was taking over.) It also highlights one of the differences between slate style and convertible UMPC’s. I can’t see a Ram mount like this for a convertible like the Fujitsu P1610. You may be able to use a small laptop mount but it wouldn’t be the same.

As we wait for UMPC announcements from Microsoft and others at CES, I started wondering about the health of the UMPC market. The critics have tended to be pretty harsh but vendors keep pushing out models. Samsung has 4, TabletKiosk should have 3 after CES. Nobody wants to report sales numbers except the anecdotal report that Asus had moved 40,000 units by focusing on the auto market.

The ultimate decision maker is the market. So what does the market say about these devices? A quick ebay check of open auctions (I was too cheap to spend the cash to review closed auctions) reveals that there aren’t that many devices for sale out there, a few Q1’s a couple of Asus and a couple of EO units. Yet still one could argue that not that many were sold, so few would be available for resale. Yet, we know that Best Buy sold out fast early on, the Asus has been hard to get, and Woot moved a couple hundred refurbished Q1’s, selling one every 4 minutes. So the items are in the marketplace but staying put with their owners, a good sign. Even more telling, the prices aren’t suffering much on the resale side. Q1’s are still getting close to $900 (albeit with some extras and upgrades that don’t come free with a new unit). Asus units as well are over $800 with a day still left in the auction and we all know how auctions can jump at the last minute.

So the current crop of UMPC’s aren’t devaluing too badly on the resale market. We haven’t really seen any new units that meet the Origami spec since the Asus but we suspect that vendors are waiting for CES. What’s telling is number of non-UMPC units that WANT to be UMPC’s. The OQO, Flybook, Fujitsu P1610 and Sony UX all come close enough to the specs to be real alternatives to an Origami UMPC and very useful machines but some others like the HTC Athena and S-Xgen aren’t really PC’s at all. They’re more like steroidal PDA’s but they want the UMPC moniker. Nobody wants to be a PDA any more.

There are a few basics branding plateaus in business.

1) If people tattoo your brand on their body, you have reach the pinnacle of branding (think Harley or Disney)
2) If your brand becomes a common verb, you’re a monster hit and worth a few billion. (FedEx, Xerox and much to their dismay, Google. Sling may be on it’s way here too.)
3) If people are knocking off your product or using similar product names, you’ve got a big hit. (iPod, Blackberry, Louis Vuitton, Rolex)

No one brand of UMPC has reach the number 3 level yet but the UMPC category as whole has. That’s good for the health of the market and an indicator that things are headed in the right direction. I think this CES and Vista are important milestones for the UMPC platform. Remember, this platform is less than a year old. The first real units when on sale in May of 2006. Vista and CES promise to give UMPC’s a shot in the arm, but overall UMPC health looks pretty good.