Mossberg slams first UMPC out of the gate
It appears that Walt doesn't have much use for the Samsung Q1, the first shipping UMPC.
While other reviewers may yet be kinder, I think it's instructive (and it's hard to argue that some of the particulars he cites aren't real problems with the whole concept) to note that "announced product category that sounds cool on the face of it" does not equal "OMFG Apple better do something now or they'll be left behind forever in the new amazing reality!"
There was a certain feverishness around the "Origami" announcement ("Shit! Apple leapfrogged by Microsoft! Oh the humiliation!") but it appears that reality points, once again, to why it is so much harder for MS to innovate in the form factor space, when they don't actually control the hardware.
While other reviewers may yet be kinder, I think it's instructive (and it's hard to argue that some of the particulars he cites aren't real problems with the whole concept) to note that "announced product category that sounds cool on the face of it" does not equal "OMFG Apple better do something now or they'll be left behind forever in the new amazing reality!"
There was a certain feverishness around the "Origami" announcement ("Shit! Apple leapfrogged by Microsoft! Oh the humiliation!") but it appears that reality points, once again, to why it is so much harder for MS to innovate in the form factor space, when they don't actually control the hardware.
Comments
Oh and, putting Sony up there with 'offering something new' is seriously devoid of any argument, unless Walty considers rootkits 'bold' and 'new', which, in retrospect, they kinda are. Not for the good though.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
So let me get this straight; Samsung made all the decisions on what goes and what doesn't on the piece of hardware reviewed, yet Intel and MS get the blame?
Oh and, putting Sony up there with 'offering something new' is seriously devoid of any argument, unless Walty considers rootkits 'bold' and 'new', which, in retrospect, they kinda are. Not for the good though.
Well, if Intel and MS are going to do a big press rollout of "Origami" and MS is going to run teaser ads and then a big lifestyle video, then yeah, I think we can blame them.
They are in effect saying "Look at this utterly cool and life changing thing we came up with! We've signed up hardware partners, just wait till your get your hands on our new concept!"
So if the hardware partners birth something lame, then the spec wasn't very good, or the underlying concept isn't very good, or both.
Samsung did all the decision making as far as I can tell, and they created a pretty good product. It's expensive, yes, but that's because they're charging a premium for it. just like every other manufacturer that has these light-weight laptop-wanna-bees in their line-up. Don't get me wrong, I dislike the thing as well as the idea itself, but I just didn't find his review of the hardware to offer enough arguments to justify his stabs at MS or Intel. MS I could tolerate, because they hyped it so much, but Intel? They just provide the processor.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
Well technically, Mossberg never actually said anything negative about the OS or anything bad about the chip (a 900Mhz chip is pretty decent for that size) so MS and Intel didn't do anything wrong. Did they hype it? Yeah, they did, especially MS. MS is known for hyping things and then delivering less-than-expected, so in that regard, their approach to marketing hasn't changed a bit.
Samsung did all the decision making as far as I can tell, and they created a pretty good product. It's expensive, yes, but that's because they're charging a premium for it. just like every other manufacturer that has these light-weight laptop-wanna-bees in their line-up. Don't get me wrong, I dislike the thing as well as the idea itself, but I just didn't find his review of the hardware to offer enough arguments to justify his stabs at MS or Intel. MS I could tolerate, because they hyped it so much, but Intel? They just provide the processor.
Really? I thought his major points were entirely about the underlying concept:
--Price. I guess we'll see with upcoming examples, but I imagine if Samsung could have made it much cheaper they would have. Certainly having a selling price of twice the "target price" MS and Intel envisioned suggests a certain amount of wishful thinking on the part of the latter. After all, this is a laptop without a keyboard, and a keyboard isn't a big contributor to total cost.
--Short battery life. It's just inherent in the form factor. Running a full on OS on a 7" screen with any kind of acceptable performance and screen brightness means pretty decent current demands, which means short battery life in a small battery. As he notes, you can stick a bigger battery in, but that increases weight and thickness in a way that works against rationale of the thing.
--Low screen res. Well, it's a 7" screen. That's part of the concept. You make a 7" inch screen very high res and you'll need a jeweler's loupe to make out your icons. You make the screen any bigger and it's just a Tablet edition PC. You make things viewable and you have to constantly scroll to see a whole page.
--No keyboard. As Mossberg says, "Without a keyboard, many standard tasks in Windows are a huge hassle" And he didn't much like the virtual keyboard, and that certainly is an MS thing.
It sounds like Samsung didn't help by using clumsy navigation buttons, but are the hardware manufacturers really supposed to figure out how to work around the glaring functionality problem of using an OS that is built around the use of keyboard when there isn't one? Other manufacturers could add an accessory keyboard, but now you're just a less usable Tablet PC, again.
And of course this is the kind of thing that hurts MS because they don't control the "whole widget"-- they have no good way of doing tight integration of hardware solutions that work with software innovations to make this actually work, or work elegantly. Or at least I assume that if they had had some ideas on this count they would have shared them with Samsung (unless the crappy navigation buttons were MS's idea?).
All of this confirms my original feelings about this thing-- why not just get a small laptop? You solve all the above problems at one go, including price/performance ratio, and give up a few inches and a pound or so.
As I said at the time, once you're bigger than "pocketable", ala a PDA, there really isn't a "natural" size for the next form factor up. 9"x5.5"x1" and just under two pounds for a UMPC doesn't seem like a big win over any number of small PC laptops, considering the tradeoffs.