Interview with Samsung

I "made nice" with Samsung and got to Email their UMPC team on the future of their products. I'm eager to see what's coming. In the following interview, there's not a lot of NEW information, but it's clear that Samsung "gets it" when it comes to UMPC design. UltraMobileGeek questions are in black text, Samsung responses are in blue.

Samsung has a small handful (no pun intended) of Q1 devices on the market already. How was the market reception to these devices? The market reception has been tremendous. From general consumers looking to reduce the size and weight of what they carry with them on a daily basis, to businesses looking to deploy vertically-oriented applications like salesforce automation, medical information systems, etc., to educational institutions looking to outfit their students with highly portable computing devices, the interest has truly been great. UMPCs are currently constrained by battery requirements, CPU power, and chipset power. What is Samsung doing to overcome these obstacles? In designing mobile PC’s, the challenge is always creating the right balance between battery life, system performance and system size. When defining a new product, a discussion of technology trade-offs takes place as one goes through the product requirements. In order to achieve the defined length of battery life, the engineers can determine what amount of battery capacity is required given the type of CPU that will be used and given the amount of power it requires in order to run. This in turn goes a long way to define the overall system size and weight. And of course all through this process, we are working with the Engineers to determine if new technologies are available to make the device faster, smaller, lighter, and longer lasting. etc. The next generation of UMPC devices will take advantage of a new CPU from Intel that reduces its power requirements which means longer battery life. It also integrates additional circuits allowing the PCB to be smaller. The trade off however is that overall system performance goes down as compared to a current Mobile Pentium CPU. The release of Vista is hard on UMPC manufacturers and early adopters. The target market wants to be on the leading edge of technology, and now that means Windows Aero. Are there plans to have Aero compatible devices in the near future? Absolutely. It is just a matter of working with the chip manufacturers to drive power consumption down while driving graphics performance up and reducing the overall chip size. The decision to include an SSD in a Q1 model is wonderful for durability, speed, and battery life, but hard on the pocketbook. Will the SSD line remain at the luxury level is Samsung working with partners to bring these to the mainstream? Since the SSD is still “new” technology – in terms of these large capacities – there is still an obvious price premium as there is an analogous cost premium. Samsung is in an envious position in that as the largest producer of memory chips, it can be on the leading edge of driving these costs lower so that they become more affordable to the “masses”. You can expect this to occur as time moves forward. Speaking of durability: UMPCs are exposed to many more operating environments than standard computers or laptops. Are there rugged Q1 UMPCs in the roadmap? We’re back to the trade-off discussion. To add additional product rugged-ization means to add additional size and weight to the system. By its nature, the SSD is more rugged as it eliminates all internal moving parts. Samsung will work with third-party accessory manufacturers to create custom, Q1-specific components that help to further rugged-ize the Q1. There is a lot of buzz about the LED backlit display on the Q1P. It's really a very nice feature. Can you talk about that for a moment? This is another example of Samsung using its home-grown component technologies to add value to it product solutions. LED backlit displays consume less power and require less electronics to support, making it ideal for small form factor products requiring extended battery life. Are there any plans on making a Samsung device as small as the new OQO 02? We cannot comment on future, unannounced products, but I can assure you that Samsung is always looking at and planning for the next generation devices. Are there plans to increase interoperability between Samsung's Q1 line and other Samsung products such as phones? Not sure what you are looking for here. Samsung believes that there will always be a need for dedicated cell phones that may or may not include some additional functionality – e.g. MP3, camera, etc. From a UMPC perspective, the issue of importing the phone functionality into the device is a hot topic that the market will help to ultimately define. At this point though in its young existence, incorporating the cell phone functionality into a UMPC is most likely to be first adopted by the vertical user community versus the mainstream horizontal user. Why? Simply based on the “all things to all people” argument. The Internet is run by user-generated content. Wikipedia, MySpace, and YouTube are among the most popular sites in the US right behind the search engines. Has Samsung's plan for ultra-mobile PCs been changed by this recent influx of user-generated content? In the sense that users want to be connected anytime, anywhere, then Samsung has definitely heard the “Voice of the Customer”, and it certainly influences our product designs and configurations. If there is one "dream feature" that you would like to have included in the current Q1 line but couldn't, what is it? 8 hours of battery life on a single charge without having to use an extended battery or other type of power pack and without impacting system performance, size, etc.

Thank you for your time, Samsung!