SmartQ 5, an experiemental low price MID product
In my previous post about Cube H800, I mentioned that the MID product I was interested in is the enlarged version of SmartQ 5, the SmartQ 7, because of its rich features for a pretty low price (about 130 USD).
However, after going through information and complains about SmartQ 5, I feel that it is just an experimental product and not good enough for serious usage. Here is a simple summary of problems of SmartQ 5/7
- The OS of SmartQ 5/7, which is based on Ubuntu, is not well optimized. It seems that the company just ported the desktop version and didn’t really customized the OS to fit MID platform. The result is that most programs running on SmartQ 5/7 are quite slow and frequently crash.
- The user experience hasn’t been well considered. For example, many people use SmartQ 5/7 as e-book readers, but there is no PageUP/PageDown hard key or navigator wheel.
- The media playing capacity of SmartQ 5/7 is quite poor, though major products of this company are MP4 players.
- The WiFi and bluetooth on SmartQ 5/7 are very unstable, which should be the problem of drive.
- There are too many bugs in the firmware of SmartQ 5/7. New firmwares fixed some of them, but quite some issues remain.
SmartQ 5/7 certainly have their highlight to attract many users.
- The price is very low, about 90 euro for 4.8 inch screen size and 130 euro for 7 inch screen size.
- SmartQ 5/7 have plenty of features including USB OTG, bluetooth, WiFi and so on.
- External storage, keyboard, mouse can be connected to SmartQ 5/7 via USB port.
- The web surfing of SmartQ 5/7 is quite OK with WiFi or EDGE/3G via USB/bluetooth.
My impression is that SmartDevices, the company made SmartQ 5/7, developed an experimental hardware platform with an OS just could working. If you just want an ebook reader or a toy to play with, SmartQ 5/7 seems to be a good offer. But if you want a MID to handling more heavy tasks, you’d better wait for a while.
