Inbetweenie seeks employment

THE Q1 IS Samsung's first attempt at an ultra-mobile PC, and we were impressed with its ergonomics. A joystick sits under your left thumb and acts in the same way as the arrow keys on a keyboard, while shortcut buttons are placed under your right thumb.

It weighs in at 779g and has a 7in screen, which has a native resolution of 800 x 480 but when run at 800 x 600 and 1,024 x 600, performs well enough for watching movies, reckons Will Stapley.

Since there's obviously no room for an internal optical drive, you'll either have to hook up an external drive or convert what you want to watch to a format such as DivX - the advantage of the latter being less battery drain.

In our initial tests, we watched a half hour DivX video and the battery went down by just 20 per cent.

The 3.5 hours of battery life under standard use isn't particularly good seeing as this is the kind of device that's designed to be carried around all day away from the mains.

You can upgrade to a six-cell battery, which will last around six hours, or alternatively use an external battery pack to keep it running for up to nine hours. Pricing for these battery upgrades hasn't been released as yet.

The Q1 runs Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005, which boasts Microsoft's excellent handwriting recognition application.

You can also use the new Dialkeys tool to enter text. This involves the idea that you bash in individual letters using your thumbs - like when sending a text message.

Other than that we we're sure what to do with it.

The built-in twin microphone system means voice recognition is more accurate than with a standard microphone set up, but you need to spend a fair time training the system in order for accuracy to reach an acceptable level. The asking price of £799 isn't bad if you can find a use for it other than as portable media player, otherwise there are far cheaper options available. ?

L'INQ
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