If you turn up at a Web conference of 700 industry members and are the only person with a UMPC, what does it mean?
I went to The Next Web conference last week which was an excellent two days of stimulation. We heard talks from VC’s, from data portability experts, from startups, from established brands along with having a bit of fun with a live recording of Diggnation (the one with the spliffs!) and some comedy from Boom Chicago Amsterdam. All in all it was well worth taking a few days away for and it’s really encouraged me to get more involved with the European web scene at events like this. Although there’s a lot going on in Europe, a European can’t just put a twitter out on a Saturday afternoon and expect to meet up with 50 like-minded individuals in the evening like people in the Valley can.
I took along the Samsung Q1 Ultra for the event and although I knew it would be a lap-event (no tables in the conference hall) I was interested to see how the Q1 Ultra performed. The main advantage was the battery life. Forget the size and weight advantages, I had a single, 6-hour capable device with me and instead of a charger, took an aditional small battery for a total of 10 hours of run-time. To cut the cords was so nice. I was able to read feeds outside and while standing with a coffee and that’s something I didn’t see anyone else doing. The second advantage was comfort. I was able to use the Q1 in far more positions than a notebook can be used in and there was no sweaty lap problem!
I didn’t feel that size was a major advantage. I still had to put the device in a bag where I could have put a mininote but there was definitely a weight advantage. A number of people asked me about the device (no-one knew what it was although someone suggested it was an Origami device!) and one in particular, picked it up and without a thought, said that it would be good for knocking someone out. What he was experiencing was the surprise at how dense the device was for its size. The fact that he was holding it like a club and that it weighed less than half the weight of a MacBook Air was lost on him!
There were two disadvantages though and the main one was of course, text input. I don’t use inking and I don’t use on-screen keyboards but I do use the split thumboard on the Q1. Its slow. I’m quite fast on it but compared to a keyboard, its slow. You can not deny that if you need to type more than a couple of lines, a notebook would be better. Fortunately, during the whole conference, I didn’t need to do much typing. I posted a couple of articles but both of those were done while at a table with a USB keyboard and done with the same speed (the Samsung Q1 keyboard is as fast as any full-size keyboard I have) as anyone with a laptop. 90% of the time I was reading feeds, news, websites and typing in URLS which meant that the Q1 was almost as fast as any notebook. Application speeds are fine on the Q1 Ultra. The 1 second longer that it takes to open Firefox is just not worth arguing about!
The second problem was Q1 Ultra-specific and it’s a problem that got seriously in the way of my productivity. It had nothing to do with the size, wight, performance or screen size. It was the WiFi sensitivity. It’s not class-leading and although I was occasionally able to steal one of the 50 host slots on the provided wifi, the quality of the reception was so poor that it often dropped out and I was left hunting for a slot on another AP. Other were having the same problem so to put it into perspective, the Q1 Ultra wasn’t any worse than average but it has to be said that most of the Mac users seemed to be very happy with the WiFi situation. A strong Wifi signal has moved up my list of requirements since last week!
So all in all, I was very very happy and somewhat proud to be using a ultra mobile PC at the event. Conferences are perfect places for UMPCs and i’m sure that if they were cheaper, people would be buying them purely for these scenarios. There’s no point taking a 5lb 15″ 2Ghz 200Gb monster to an event like this but of course, if you already have one of these notebooks, its difficult to justify buying a second device just for conferences! If I wasn’t in the ultra mobile PC industry, I probably would have been there with a notebook PC too!
Moral of the story: UMPCs are far more suited to some scenarios than notebooks are but the scenarios are so rare that very few people are able to justify the high cost of a specialised device.
How should the ultra mobile PC industry fix this? Either they lower the entry point for UMPCs or increase the capability of a ultra mobile PC such that it can be used as a notebook replacement. Unfortunately the latter argument has some physical problems associated with it but if manufacturers attack the cost issue, we could see low cost UMPCs being picked up as second, specialist-use devices. The entry-level cost is dropping rapidly now so I wonder if I’ll see more mobile devices at next year’s conference!
