Look at this thing. Is it the coolest thing you've ever seen or what? Yes: yes, it is.
In case you're thinking, "Um, Heather, what exactly am I seeing?"...you're looking at me standing in the middle of the kitchen, wirelessly looking at my blog on a hand-held computer running Vista. It's got a 40 GB hard drive. It's got a gig of RAM. And it only weighs 1.5 pounds. It's called a UMPC (ultra-mobile PC). This particular brand is a Samsung Q1. Those of you who know me IRL may know that I have been obsessively price-checking these things for well over a year now. Before we moved into our new place, I was trying to figure out the most important question: How would the network be set up? (This is what the geeky girls worry about. Not what color the walls should be or what kind of bedroom furniture to get. No, we worry about how we're going to get on the Interwebz at any time of day.) Anyway, this ilttle gizmo was the solution to surfing on any one of three floors while the server lived on the ground floor. However, I could never justify spending the $900 for the Q1.
Recently, they announced new Q1 models, so we expected a price drop on the older models. Friday night we decided to do a search to see when we could expect a drop, and Michael the wonder husband found this blog entry. Of course, stores were closed by that point, so I said a little extra prayer before going to bed. To make a long story a little less long, we had to go to three Best Buys before finding one that had a unit we could actually purchase. The first one had none, but did have a very helpful employee who gave us locations still showing a floor model and their phone numbers. There were three stores with four units amongst them in all of the ATL!! We headed for the store that showed a boxed unit in stock, but that unit had been sent back and the floor model was returned. I could see it sitting in the Geek Squad area, but they couldn't sell it to me because no one knew why it had been returned and there was no documentation. The second store no longer had the floor model. I called the next store and spoke to someone who said he would hold their floor model for me. We zipped over. It's a good thing I called, because another girl was fingering the floor model when I arrived! I still had to deal with the floor manager. She did not want to honor the $386 price that was showing up in the system, even after the store manager approved it! It took about half an hour for her to agree with the store manager. I should have gotten another 10% off since it was the floor model (I was getting no box, no documentation, no disks, and only the power cable), but I was afraid to press my luck, since that was the last one in Atlanta at that point!
It's totally touchscreen. It can even read my handwriting! *swoon!*
And, as a bonus, while the Geek Squad was removing the BB software, we "had" to stroll around and found a cofee table we actually liked...and it was on clearance! Not at Best Buy. At a store named Area, replete with flaming design types, though not with the gaudy accessories I have come to expect in these boutique furniture stores. Everything was modern, but not spartan, and had very nice sensibility to it.
Glad I said that prayer!
| JiffNotes |
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| Space heater or kewl new gadget? Please. What do you think? |
4 comments:
I think it's a Tres Kewl toy! Richard, Mac snob that he is, looked down his nose and said (having only looked at the picture) "It probably runs Windows, right?". No appreciation, I tell you. Glad you're back in the heat anyway. :)
Oh please, whatever you do, do not show my father! If he purchases one more gadget, my mother will personally kill him, and this is precisely the kind of thing he would adore.
KEWL toy, and don't you just love Vista? I really am tres jealous....
What a cool toy Heather I had never heard/seen of these!
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