An Itsy Bitsy Problem

The Samsung Q1 is a very small, very clever PC saddled with two very big

drawbacks. It's the first incarnation of a design called the ultramobile PC,

and it is well-suited to playing videos and games. But its $1,099 price, four

times that of a Sony PlayStation Portable, is way too high. And Windows XP just

doesn't work on a device this size.

Time will likely take care of the first problem as cheaper products arrive

from the likes of Taiwan's ASUS and China's founder group, all based on the

same Microsoft-Intel UMPC design. But making XP and other software run smoothly

may be much more difficult.

Ultramobile means ultrasmall. The Q1 weighs just 27 oz., is barely an inch

thick, and makes do with a 7-in. screen. Microsoft claims such computers can run

'full-size software,' but in my tests neither Windows nor standard

applications fit.

Microsoft has done several things to ameliorate the problems caused by the

lack of a keyboard and the tiny display. The UMPC uses Tablet PC software that

lets you enter text by tapping a familiar onscreen keyboard with a stylus or by

using handwriting recognition. In addition, with the push of a button you can

call up a new type of virtual keyboard: Two quarter-circle arcs appear in the

lower corners of the screen, with keys big enough to hit with your thumbs. It

looks weird, but it works reasonably well as long as the keyboard doesn't hide

the part of the screen you need.

To help with the small display, a special menu uses extra-large buttons and

icons to launch common applications such as the Internet Explorer Web browser or

the wireless network selection program. The problem is that more often than not

the programs these buttons link to have not been redesigned for the small

screen. The browser devotes a lot of space to toolbars and icons, and on the Q1,

these fill much of the screen. A Google search page showed just one result,

compared with five on the 12.1-in. widescreen display of a Gateway E-100M

ultralight notebook. Watching films from Movielink is a natural use of the Q1,

but selecting films for download from the Web is painful, because the site was

designed for a display at least three times as large.

The UMPC's usefulness soars when it runs software that has been tailored to

its diminutive screen. This point was drummed in by a couple of well-customized

programs. Microsoft has designed a special version of Windows Media Player that

has buttons big enough to hit with a finger, but still leaves most of the screen

available to show video or album art and song descriptions. Then there's the

specially designed version of Sling Media's mobile TV player. If you have

Slingbox hardware connected to your home TV system, you can use the Q1's full

screen to watch live shows or programs you have stored on a TiVo or on another

video recorder.

The Q1 makes a nice, if seriously overpriced, video viewer, and hardware

improvements in coming months are likely to make it even better. New Intel

processors will boost its somewhat sluggish performance while extending the

mediocre three hours or so of battery life. Using flash memory could allow the

sort of instant-on response we expect from handheld devices, while also reducing

the need to run the battery-draining hard drive.

Still, unless something is done to make the software fit the device, hardware

improvements will be in vain. With the Windows UMPC in its present form, buyers

would do better to step up to an ultralight laptop or down to a PlayStation

Portable or a handheld media player.