Samsung Origami gizmo universally slated

IF I REACH for my swingometer you can see that Labour has made a great many losses here in the north, the south, also the east and somewhat in the west in yesterday's local election polling.

But Tony Blair is still getting better reviews than Samsung's Q1 now that the returns are in for the first commercially available ‘Origami' Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) devices.

Peter Svensson of AP reaches for the stiletto in his opening paragraph.

"Looking for a great PC that runs a fully fledged version of Windows XP but weighs less than two pounds? Well, it's here — at least if you can live without the ‘great' part."

Stephen H. Wildstrom at Business Week, like almost everybody, believes the Q1 is "seriously overpriced" - it's about £800 here in the UK -- and suffers from "sluggish performance" and "mediocre" battery life.

Performance benchmarks generally ding Samsung's Q1 for the lacklustre performance emanating from the Celeron and short battery life relating to the use of a hard drive rather than flash memory. It probably also weighs too much and it certainly needs to get website designers to think about the needs of people viewing screens the size of a paperback novel.

PC Magazine saw it as "just another questionable attempt by Bill Gates to revive the Slate Tablet" and awarded two and half stars out of five.

Will Stapley in Persional Computer World was more generous, however, giving the Q1 four stars out of five, despite admitting “we're struggling to work out who it's aimed at". Will also squeezes out a plum from Samsung -- pre-orders are only in their "hundreds" in the UK.

The conclusion: this is an interesting first stab. Swap out the hard drive for flash, put a faster chip in there, fix the usability glitches and halve the price and we'll be back to use these things as media players and for ad hoc tasks. µ