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The Q1 boots as quickly as any other computer running the Tablet PC operating system, i.e. not very quickly. Samsung has helped a little by providing the AVStation software that lets you access movies, music and photos, and allowing you to run this without first booting Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. But all that does is turn the Q1 into a media viewer, without its core computing functions.

Battery life is a problem. I’d expect a device like this to run all day without needing a juice boost, but even Samsung rates the battery. at just 3.5 hours. Using Wi-Fi for a spot of sofa based Web browsing I got considerably less than that.

What about ease of use? A wire running to the mains when the battery gets low doesn’t help. But on the plus side the Q1 has a passive screen you can tap with anything you like: when Web browsing you can flick through linked pages using a finger tip to select them, for example. But getting URLs into the browser in the first place is a little fiddly. You are stuck with the Tablet PC tappable on-screen keyboard or handwriting recognition, and both are best used with the stylus, which inevitably will get lost at some point.

The Q1 is not unduly heavy at 779g, but it isn’t as slim as I’d like. It feels more like a hardback novel than a slimline PDA. And the screen, at just seven inches on the diagonal, is smaller than I’d like too.

My major gripe as far as Comfort Computing goes is that the Q1 seems to have been designed to be used primarily in landscape format. The Tablet PC operating system lets you flip the screen between portrait and landscape, and this is easy to do using a tappable button. But the mini joypad and select buttons are on the short edges of the Q1 with the whole thing designed to be used in a games console style and held in both hands. In portrait format the buttons are very awkward to use.

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