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Samsung Australia is exploring the concept of launching iT’s Q1 Windows-based ultra-mobile PC in Australia in the third quarter.
The Company already has a sample and is currently researching pricing and distribution. currently Samsung sell notebooks but no PC’s or Media Centres. If launched the product would sell for around $1,500 to $1,999.A spoksman for the Company Kurt Jovias said “We have a sample of the device in Country. It is very smart. we are currently researching the market, however no decision has been made as to whether we will launch the Samsung product in Australia.
The Origami machines run a tablet version of the Windows XP operating system and has recently been launched in Korea, the US and Europe. In the US the Q1 will retail for US$1,099 which is higher than the target price named by Microsoft in March when the product was launched at the CEBit show in Europe.. Microsoft collaborated with Intel to create the Origami platform, on which the Q1 and other ultra-mobile PC devices are based. When it introduced the platform, Microsoft said the devices would be priced between $500 and $1,000.
Origami machines run a tablet version of the Windows XP operating system and are aimed at a market niche between laptop PCs and PDAs. They can also be used as a home automation control device. The devices allow users to browse the Internet, listen to music, view movies and other video entertainment, play games and “write” handwritten notes much as they can on a Microsoft TabletPC device. It took some thinking to come up with a hybrid version of Windows that marries some of the features of both the mobile and desktop versions of the OS, said Bill Mitchell, corporate vice president, mobile platforms division for Microsoft.
“You can’t take Windows, plunk it down on a small form factor and call it a day,” he said, speaking at the Monday launch event. “The first step was to make Windows appropriate for this size.” Microsoft already is running the next version of Windows, Vista, on ultra-mobile PCs in the labs and will be working in the future to bring to the devices some of the new features Vista will bring to PCs, Mitchell said.
Samsung’s Q1 has a 7-inch iquid crystal display monitor with touchscreen functionality and is about half the size of an average laptop PC. At 1.7 pounds it is also lighter, and is less than an inch thick. Its battery life is about three hours. Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research, said the pricing of the Q1 is a little high for mainstream consumers to add it to their cache of digital devices right away. But he said Samsung and its partners have put a lot of effort into making the new ultra-mobile PC stylish and innovative, and it is worth the price tag if someone wants to carry only one device instead of both a PC and a PDA.
“At $1,100, it’s not for everyone,” Wilcox said. “But for the folks that pay, they’ll get a ‘wow’ experience.” Other companies that plan to offer ultra-mobile PC devices include Taiwan’s Asustek Computer, and a company tied to China’s Founder Group.
