The Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium (mouthful) is about to go on travel again. Going through some of my digital archives tonight, I stumbled across my notes from last year. While I was shopping for a small portable computing device that would eventually become the Q1b, the Ultra's predecessor in my collection of mobile gadgets, I apparently was running across enough variables that it made sense to type some of them out.

Here are my notes from the days leading up to the purchase...

"UMPC Buying Decision Notes
5/26/07
* Newegg has the Samsung Q1P loaded with Vista for $1149, $30 cheaper than the same version loaded with XP.
* TechforLess, via Amazon.com, has the WinXP version (Q1p, 1GHz Pentium M, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD) for $1027.34, $122 cheaper than the NewEgg price.
* supposedly new Samsung Q1's will debut starting in June, tech specs at this URL:
http://www.gottabemobile.com/SamsungQ1UltraUMPCSpecsAndPricing.aspx

.....the $1149 SKU gets you the 60GB HD, all of them have the same processor speed and come equipped with the same RAM, the $1149 SKU comes with WinXP, while the others have Win Vista, I can't see paying $300 extra for +200MHz in processor speed and +20GB of HD space, esp since I've decided I'll be using this device in conjunction with my MacBook, which has a 120GB HD, and I have the Maxtor 100GB Portable drive - you know, another question is will these new SKU's fit with the USB keyboard and case that I've already ordered? If I don't see solid, trustworthy benchmarks of these new Intel Ultra Mobile Processors that establish proof that they perform better than the current Q1 SKU's, I'll be sticking with a legacy model."

At this point I was struggling between three variants of the Q1: the top of the line 1GHz Pentium M model, the 1GHz VIA C7 processor model, and the Celeron-powered version. Having been on Celerons before in my days as a computing apprentice, I had no desire to go back to that point in time. However, I was concerned about battery power, so I eventually went with the Q1b, whose VIA C7 processor consumed power at a much slower rate than the Pentium M. Almost a year later, I even splurged for the extended battery, but shortly thereafter decided to go ahead and upgrade to a Q1 Ultra.

Man, was buying thiat thing hard. Prices on the web were all over the place, changed daily, and the multiple models did not help. Frequently, on any given day, you would find the lesser specced models available at prices higher than a more powerful version, although the more powerful version would be out of stock. Despite all of the negative press that UMPCs get, the Samsung Q1's were disappearing faster than I could track them, and as inventory became short on certain days, prices were jacked higher. Many days as this went on, I had to make the decision to wait until certain models came back into stock, or pull the trigger on a higher priced model.

At precisely this time, Microsoft was also doing what it could to further "encourage" buyers to adopt its 6 month old OS, Windows Vista. So Q1 models equipped with XP were often found being sold at a higher price than the Vista model with the same specs. Since I was skeptical about how these things would perform, I was insistent that mine run XP.

You can also see that I was aware of the coming of the Samsung Q1 Ultra. At the time, they were known to be debuting armed with the Intel McCaslin processor, which has turned out to be an interim, bridge solution, until Atom could be prepared. Again, it is so interesting how history plays out in the digital market. The market for computing devices even smaller than ultraportable laptops was about to boom. MiDs (Mobile Internet Devices) which have yet to really hit the market in force and take off, were predicted to be the killer system solution most consumers would go for. Intel knew they had to make a chip that offered sufficient power to render a complete computing experience in a mobile environment, but VIA's more energy efficient chips offered nearly the same power as Intel's offerings at the time. Intel never intended for the A110 McCaslin processors to be their flag-bearing mobile device processor (although you could not tell from all of the marketing hype being spewed). While Intel put McCaslin on the market with claims of its impending domination in the marketplace, in reality they just meant it to allow them to hold position against VIA's processors while they raced to complete Atom and get it to market before VIA could leap frog them with a processor that maintained their energy efficiency edge, but also upped its processing power.

I am not sure how or where VIA got derailed. Near as I can tell, their Isaiah processors are still not present in the market in volume, if at all, with most OEM's who are using VIA procs continuing to choose variants of the C7-M, built on the Esther architecture.

While my analysis was ok back in 2007, the future turned out a bit different. I wound up with a Q1b with 40GB of hard drive space and 512MB of RAM. The Q1 Ultra that replaced it jumped to 80GB of hard drive space and 1 GB of RAM. While I struggled to find a Q1 for a reasonable price without the "XP" tax applied to it, by the time the Q1 Ultra hit, Microsoft realized that it was better to give the customers in this niche market a choice in OS without penalizing them for picking XP. When I bought my Q1 Ultra, Atom was still not ready, but Intel kept up the trench warfare against VIA by getting its Core Solo processor in a version of the Q1 Ultra, profoundly trumping VIA's available processing power in a UMPC-accommodating package.

While my standard travel kit was the MacBook and the Q1 for a few months, I eventually abandoned that configuration. Today, the Q1 Ultra goes out either by itself, or as a backup to the Gateway to come off the bench when the GatewayFX's battery runs too low or if the laptop is too big itself for me to open it on the plane. As notebook hard drive capacities have increased, I have dropped the Maxtor 100GB Portable hard drive from my standard outfitting for most trips.

The keyboard and case bundle that I'd ordered for the Q1 wound up not being compatible with the Q1 Ultra. The keyboard worked fine, but the case's retention clips were for the Q1's rounded corner form-factor, not the Q1 Ultra's more squared-off body shape. I wound up selling them both (the keyboard and case) with the Q1 when I offloaded it. It was therefore good that I followed my own advice from the notes and went ahead with the purchase of the Q1 then, so that I did not eat the cost of the case and keyboard. I now have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the Q1 Ultra, and just slip the UMPC itself into the soft cloth-case that it came with for travel.

When the McCaslin processors hit, the benchmarks did not prove more than marginally encouraging. In most applications, McCaslin was only slightly faster than a VIA C7 or an Intel Pentium M. In fact, in the case of the Pentium M, McCaslin was sometimes slower. It did offer more battery power, but I did not find this encouraging. If I have more battery power, but the computer is so slow that I wind up getting the same amount of work done as I would have on a faster PC that had less battery power, then it is just a wash.

So, I did stick with my Q1. For about a year. Then the Core Solo powered Q1 Ultra arrived. That's what I'm rocking these days, but I would have never predicted it based on the way things looked in lat spring of 2007. Just one of life's little quirks, I guess.