Nice as a Gadget but fails at the real purpose

www.samsung.com/uk/products/mobilecomputing/ultramobile/np_q1_v000suk.asp

In a bid to crack the crowded market for hand-held computers and music players, Microsoft and two electronics companies, Samsung of Korea and Asus of Taiwan, plan to unveil an ultralight tablet computer on Thursday that melds a laptop and media player into a thin, new device.

Samsung’s device, the Q1, will use Microsoft’s Window’s XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. It is a product of Microsoft’s so-called Origami project, an effort to shrink and redefine laptop, while bolstering company’s software sales for new hand-held devices. Asus will also produce a version.

“This is basically a small but powerful laptop computer that is also a sophisticated entertainment device,” said Patrick Pavel, a Samsung product manager for Germany .

The Samsung device is a flat black rectangle that weighs £1.7, has the dimensions of a DVD box (about 9 inches by 5 inches) and is one inch thick. The viewing screen is 7 inches diagonally.

Despite the calculated secrecy surrounding , Microsoft’s Origami project the company has dribbled out bits of cryptic information on an obscure website for a month that suggest the debut of a new mobile device experts were skeptical that the new tablet computer would make inroads against devices like the BlackBerry and the iPod.

Andy Brown, an analyst in London with IDC, a research firm, said “converged devices” like Samsung’s Q1 faced an uphill battle to win over consumers, who are more likely to favour traditional laptops with keyboards or tiny MP3 players than dual-purpose machines.
While Microsoft dominates the desktop and laptop markets with its Windows operating systems, it trails the Symbian group led by the mobile phone makers Nokia, Ericsson , Motorola and Siemens for software on smart phones.

The growth prospects are not really strong,” he said. “The main problem for most is that they fall in between what consumers are looking for.” Representatives of Microsoft , Samsung and Asus discussed the new devices but declined to release further details.