Here I am, sitting at a table in the lounge with the Q1 Ultra and the Samsung keyboard enjoying an efficient cloud-computing moment on the Q1 Ultra 800Mhz and that damn Kevin Tofel keeps posting up news about the Q1 Ultra Premium! I’ve been impressed with the Premium ever since I had hands-on at CeBIT and have managed to keep myself happy by putting XP on my Q1 Ultra and dropping in a 6-cell battery and HSDPA module on top of the 2GB RAM module but when Kevin posted the CrystalMark scores yesterday, it made my Q1 Ultra feel very lowly indeed. 28000 isn’t a figure we haven’t seen before on a ultra mobile PC as the Sony UX has been in that arena since day-1 but its best-in-class and there’s something about the screen size, the ability to go to 2Gb, HSDPA upgrade path and of course, the 6-cell battery that returns a true 4-6 hour computing time that makes me wonder whether the Q1 Ultra Premium could be my single grab-and-go DESKTOP! Its certainly more than powerful enough for me because I’ve done a lot of desktop work with the i7210, a less powerful device and to put it into perspective, its returns a Crystal Mark result that’s as good as one of my desktop PC’s here at home. A 2003 Shuttle SS51 with a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4! OK, the spread of results isn’t quite the same as the SS51 has a crappy SiS on-board GPU but its certainly going to be powerful enough for my net-based computing tasks, for image editing, for low-end video editing and rendering (YouTube styley!,) for podcast recording via Samplitude Studio, Skype and the Samson Q1U mic. and for any sort of video watching, right up to HD quality.
The two main problems are: 1) No docking station. Yes there’s a ‘docking station’ available but its a horrible USB replicator thing and it costs over $200 which is crazy. 2) It’s not available in the EU. I’ve sent an email to the nice people over at Dynamism to see when they have one in stock.
Why don’t I just buy a 10″ laptop you might ask. If I can’t pocket the Q1 Ultra I have to take a bag which means I could drop in a ‘real’ notebook PC. Its true. Yes I could but I wouldn’t have that book-like capability that you only understand when you’ve used a ultra mobile PC in the bathroom, the very interactive, useful and fun touchscreen capability, the modularity and, to be honest, the nice feeling of ‘leading edge uniqueness’ that one has when they use such a device in public.
