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Finally, the Q1′s specifications leave much to be desired. The 900MHz Celeron M ULV dawdles by today’s standards, with noticeable lag in general use. The 40 GB hard drive is fair-sized so long as you don’t plan on saving loads of music and movies to the hard drive; however, since the device comes without an optical drive – an external USB 2.0 one is available as an accessory – users will be forced to save movies to disk to watch them. The Q1′s 512 MB of RAM is sufficient for most tasks, but can be upgraded. Battery life is average; the machine will run for 3 hours on minimum settings and around 1.5 hours when doing processor-intensive tasks, like video playback. Lastly, the price is a huge negative; for $1,099, users can now buy an Apple Macbook with 512 MB of RAM, a larger hard drive (60 GB), a larger screen (13″ @ 1280×800), a physical keyboard, and Apple’s trademark software (plus the ability to run Windows XP alongside OS X). Other PC notebooks offer better features than the Q1 for less money, making the Q1 a very difficult purchase to justify.

So, is the Q1 worth getting? Should you break open your precious piggy-bank and run, spilling coins from between your fingers, screaming “gimme gimme”? If you’re looking for an extremely portable device capable of connecting worldwide, you might be better off with an expensive PDA Smartphone with a brace of wireless broadband capabilities. On the other hand, if you want a portable media center, the Q1 might just be up your alley. Power users will be put off by the skimpy specifications, but as a device that can watch movies, surf the Internet, write email, and chat online, the Q1 fits the bill perfectly. The counter-argument to many a poor review – and there really have been many – is that Microsoft’s baby is designed for the queuing, striding, hyper-mobile corridor-warrior, someone for whom sitting down at a keyboard is perhaps only 10% of their day. It’s a trendy image, yes, but can the battery life and mildly anaemic specs support such users? Overall, UMPCs – and the Q1 – hold a great deal of promise. We just might have to wait until the second generation – Q1b and third generations for them to live up to the hype…