After a Year, Samsung Remakes the Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC

One year after Samsung Electronics introduced its first Q1 ultra-mobile PC, the company has revamped the device, making it lighter and more powerful.

The new device, called Q1 Ultra, will be unveiled Thursday during a press conference at the Cebit exhibition in Hanover, Germany.

Weighing in at 690 grams, the Q1 Ultra is 12 percent lighter than the original Q1, which weighs 780 grams. It’s also slightly smaller. The Q1 Ultra measures 228 by 124 by 24 millimeters, compared to the Q1, which measures 228 by 140 by 27 millimeters. The improvements will make the device easier to carry around.

Other changes include a sleeker overall look and a 7-inch touch-screen liquid crystal display (LCD) that offers 1,024-by-600-pixel resolution, instead of the 800-by-480-pixel resolution of the original. In addition, the touch-screen keypad on the Q1 has been replaced by a hardware keypad. The keypad is still divided in two parts, with half on each side of the device, so that users can type while holding the Q1 Ultra with both hands.

The Q1 Ultra ships with an 800MHz Intel microprocessor, 1GB of DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory and an external USB keyboard, and adds support for high-speed downlink packet access networks and WiBro, a mobile version of WiMax, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Optional extras will include a fingerprint scanner, dual digital cameras and a navigation pack.

As expected, the Q1 Ultra also received a software upgrade, shipping with Microsoft’s Windows Vista Home Premium operating system instead of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.

Pricing and availability of the Q1 Ultra were not immediately available. The Q1 is on sale from about US$1,300 to $2,000, depending on the processor.

-Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service (Singapore Bureau)

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