I've been using the Q1 in public the last couple of days, and it's been getting some very envious looks. The conductor on my train on Friday was particularly impressed. (This was on a GNER service with onboard wifi – a brilliant idea hamstrung by the grand British tradition of cocking up the railways. I managed to send one email, and my girlfriend downloaded an attachment only after prowling the corridors for 10 minutes in search of decent reception. Rubbish.)
But the most interesting reactions were from non-techy people. A designer technophobe friend was emphatuated. Touchscreen was, he said, totally unintimidating, and he was able to quickly draw an excellent picture in the terminally rubbish MS Paint in 2 minutes flat. He wants one. My mum loved the handwriting
recognition, and my dad was impressed with One Note.
Hopefully the UMPC can break the massmarket in the same
way as the Nintendo DS - by drawing in a whole new
audience.
First off, I must say that the handwriting recognition works better than l thought possible. I moved from baby block printing to doctor style scrawl within a day – with no discernible drop in recognition rates. Its helped by the fact that l can't really do joined up writing but is impressive none the less! It still has trouble with my Ks but then people have trouble with my Ks or, as Journal would have it, my £5.
The problem is with a general lack of polish. On journal, no easy, one-button method to convert writing to text. When the input panel is full there is no automatic scroll to give you more room – and if you just choose to insert there is no space character straight after. Context sensitive behaviour could fix this. I have yet to make a 'return' gesture work.
I have other problems but I don't want to whinge too much – I think I'm going to love this machine, and when the UMPC concept has had some time to bed down it will change the way we work, live and all sorts of other wild hyperbolic claims.
