Paul Nicholls Stuff

19 Tomorrow!

I'm about to enter my last year as a teenager! Where does the time go?

I'm also clueless as to what I want for my birthday, over the last 18 years I seem to have been slowly accumulating everything I want and I'm now reaching saturation point. The only thing left really is a laptop, and I'm beginning to wonder whether that's really such a great thing to get anyway.

I mean, really, the only use I can see for it will be at Uni - so I can take notes on it without having to go back to those old fashioned pen-and-pencil-and-paper-thingies (and that's not entirely just sheer laziness, digitalised notes are much more useful!) - but, is a laptop really all that great for taking notes on? In my experience not so. Firstly its bulky - even the slimline 12" models still require a certain amount of desk (or knee) space. Secondly, while I can type a lot faster than I can write, I can't diagram or scribble faster on a laptop than pen-and-paper.

So... get a tablet computer? Still doesn't really deal with the bulkiness issue, and much more importantly its the cost. Decent ones seem to start at around £1000, and that's a little out of my league at the moment!

What I need is middle ground... and the Samsung Q1 looks like it could provide just that. Its a 7" UltraMobile tablet computer, and whilst its raw performance specifications aren't all amazing, if its just being used to take notes, ssh-client, surf the web, play solitaire, etc, does it need to be high performance?

The price is reasonable too, about £550 + VAT for the lower model with 512MB RAM and a 40GB HDD, or £650 + VAT for the model with 1GB RAM and a 60GB HDD.

But do I really need it? Or do I just want it because its a shiny gadget? I could get a budget laptop for £300 + VAT, cheaper if I really shopped around, do I really need this thing? Why, also, is it the only product like it on the market? If its such a great device why aren't Dell, Sony, HP, etc selling similar devices?

I do want an iPhone though, I just can't have one yet