Flickr set here.
Overview:
On Tuesday October 24, 2006 my Q1b which I had ordered from CDW finally arrived. My initial reaction was something similar to a child opening up Christmas gifts. The device came with the battery, hand strap, manuals, recovery CDs and a 3M cleaning cloth. (this little guy helps with the fingerprints!) I was really surprised at the brightness and clarity of the screen. I’ve watched several movie trailers now on the Q1b and the screen seems brighter than my laptop.
Pricing:
The UMPC cost $899, after tax and shipping I paid $967. Reasonable. My main gripe with UMPC’s was that they needed to be below $1000 for me to be able to afford one. I guess $967 is as close as I was going to get.
My Impressions of the Device:
So far I’ve taken it to class a few times and am really impressed at how snappy it has been responding. On average I’ve found that I’m running between 36 and 39 processes, which I’d actually like to cut back a bit if possible. I’ve loaded up a few movies which seem to play back well. I say well because I’m no audio engineer; however the playback is clear, both visually and in terms of audio. I have also found OneNote to be incredibly useful after a short bout with the learning curve of using the touch screen. I’ve actually found myself just today browsing my professor’s PowerPoint presentations after class while on the bus back to my apartment. I’d never done that with my laptop.
I’ve found myself using my Q1b downstairs in the kitchen of living room browsing email or the web while just sitting around. One problem I’ve noticed float tip doesn’t play nice with Trillian even though I’ve made the changes to fix the IE7 bug which reared its ugly head earlier this week. In terms of resolution, I’ve most often kept 800×600 on most of the time. I’ve found it to be a happy medium for most purposes.
To conclude, I’m happy with my (rather expensive) purchase. The device is serving my needs and I couldn’t really ask for much more. I would like to try out a few things in the future; I’m not much of a gamer; however I would like to try to install a game or two to try on the Q1b. Also I would be interested in possibly installing an in car setup in my Civic, so that I wouldn’t get quite so lost on some of these Michigan highways. Also Vista awaits in the future. I’m sure I’ll be writing about that adventure when I decide to embark upon it.
The Test Results:
Battery Testing:
Yes, I had a bit of trouble with Battery Eater so this is just rough times of battery life:
First Scenario: Brightness at 4 bars, WIFI on, OneNote, IE7, and Windows Media Player playing video on repeat
12:15am start
1:15 @ 66%
2:15 @ 37%
3:06 Device shut off.
Total Time: 2 Hours, 51 Mins
Second Scenario: Normal Monday at school, classes from 9am-12:00pm, OneNote, IE7, minimum brightness.
Q1b on at 8:40am
1 hour gone battey at 74%
2 hours gone battery at 53%
3 hours gone battery at 22%
Battery died at 12:14pm
Total time: 3 Hours, 34 Mins
3D Mark2001 SE Results:
(Results are with 128 video RAM set in BIOS)
OSMark Results: (graph)
PlatformName VIA C7-Esther (C5J) 1000MHz DateTime 10/26/2006 5:31:14 PM CPU VIA Esther processor 1000MHz CPUVendor CentaurHauls CPUFamily 6 CPUModel 10 CPUStepping 9 CPUWinMHz 1000 CPUClockSpeed 1000038368 CPUFSB -1 CPU Count 1 Virtual CPU Count 1 L1 Data 64 L1 Instruction 64 Trace Cache L2 128 L3 Chipset UNKNOWN Chipset Driver UNKNOWN Graphics Adapter VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro II IGP Graphics Driver 6.14.10.0309-16.94.46.02 Memory Type UNKNOWN Memory Speed -1 Memory Amount 382 Hard Drive HTC426040G8CE00, Size: 40.0 GB Motherboard SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD., Model SQ1BS Motherboard BIOS Phoenix FirstBIOS(tm) Notebook Pro Version 2.0 01EA, Version: P Video Resolution 800x480x32@60Hz OS Microsoft Windows XP OSVersion 5.1 OSBuild 2600 7zip 230 AlphaBlend 165 AlphaDots 326 BandwidthBP64 204 CalculatePi 275 Circles 842 DhrystoneThreads 320 Ellipses 357 EncryptDecrypt 577 FernFractal 310 FibThreads 310 FileCopy 90 GridBlast 533 GridBlastFP 529 IThreads 186 ImageResize 380 ImageRotate 951 JpgDecode 167 LameMp3Encode 125 Lines 486 LorenzAttractor 106 Mandelbrot 468 Mazes 379 MemLatency 596 MontgomeryMultiplier 710 nBody 127 nBodyOpenGL 39 OThreads 163 PiThreads 144 PlotLines 1265 PlotTrig 650 PlotTrig2 110 PNGOut 184 RandomDots 425 Rectangles 417 RichEdit 257 SHA1 1064 SHA256 2638 Sse3 297 UPX 179 WebPageLoad 272 WhetstoneThreads 131 ZipCompress 220 OSMark 423
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I got my Samsung Q1b about a week ago and I love it. I think it is fast (when it has a good signal) and easy to use on the go. I agree with almost everything you wrote… except about the battery. I also bring mine to school and have Openoffice on, along with Firefox and my keyboard connected, with minimum brightness i still get around 3hours and 50 min to 4 hours 15 min… I don’t know if it is because of the different software or what but 3 and 1/2 seems a little low.