Samsung Gives UMPC Form Factor One More Go

Just over one year after Microsoft and a handful of hardware partners followed up a stupendous marketing campaign for something called "Origami" - which included a presentation to the press that asked the question, "What am I?" rather than answering it - Samsung revealed at the CeBIT conference in Hannover today its intention to upgrade the now-largely-forgotten UMPC platform with at least some of the key features it lacked.

For instance, the device whose category had been touted as providing "ubiquitous connectivity" - albeit without WiFi, broadband, or Bluetooth - will now have access to all three, at least in Samsung's trial run of its new Q1Ultra for the Korean market. ("Ultra," in this case, means "this time for real.")

What little public interest there was in a portable device that wasn't a phone or a music player - or, for that matter, a complete PC - evaporated soon after reporters attending last year's demonstrations at CeBIT learned the first UMPCs, including the original Samsung Q1, would drain their batteries in as little as under an hour.

So when Samsung touted the Q1Ultra today as having "30% more power," we wondered whether it meant 15 more minutes of battery life. As it turns out, Samsung promises 3.5 hours on its standard-cell battery pack, and 6 hours on the extended cell pack. That may be just enough to view a movie. And this time around, there may be the wireless connectivity to pull this off: Samsung is promising HSDPA broadband, which is widespread in Korea where the device will first be sold.

As a bonus, the Ultra edition throws in something Samsung is calling a "QWERTY keypad." In this case, the company is referring to two clusters of buttons of four rows of buttons split between the upper left and upper right corners of the Ultra, positioned in such a manner that the only way hands could type on the split keypad is if they blocked the screen in so doing.

Not much more by way of statistics is known about the Ultra; we know the original Q1 contained an Intel Celeron M 900 MHz processor. A Samsung official told Reuters at CeBIT today that he expects the Ultra to eventually make its way to the US and European markets, at a price point around $1,200.

Meanwhile for the US market, Samsung has upgraded last year's Q1, inserting the missing WiFi connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0, and Windows Vista pre-installed, along with a "P" at the end of its name. Still missing from the 9-inch-long unit with the 7" screen is a keyboard, although its touch-screen input accepts a form of text entry that Microsoft describes as "inking." The internal hard drive was boosted to 60 GB, the internal memory was boosted to 1 GB (you pretty much need that for Vista)...and the price was boosted to USD $1,299. The device is available now through various US retailers.

The Q1P continues to lack any type of keyboard - even an awkward one - though Samsung suggests borrowing the USB port if you really need input from a keyboard or mouse.

Last year, analysts said the UMPC platform might not become intriguing to US buyers until the price point dropped to USD $500. For Samsung and others to make a profit at that price point today, it would have to sell UMPCs at phenomenal volumes. So to help the platform along its merry way, Samsung executive vice president Kim Houn Soo predicted...phenomenal volumes. "By 2010, I expect the UMPC market to be 10 million units strong worldwide," Soo remarked in a prepared statement, "with the Q1Ultra leading the way."

At USD $1,200 - 1,300 for a device that can't even quite call itself a portable media player just yet (the optional external disc drive for the Q1Ultra apparently dangles off the side), that will be an extraordinarily tall order - as tall as it was last year.