Too Little, Too Lame

Rob Pegoraro
Monday, May 8, 2006 4:46 PM

I'd been carrying the Samsung Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC around for over a week before I finally heard "what's that?" from a stranger. I was listening to some music on the train to RFK Stadium for Thursday night's debacle when the man sitting across the aisle popped the question. The guy on the seat next to mine, evidently impressed by this laptop-esque device as well, leaned over to hear the conversation.

I took the headphones out and, feeling vaguely like a salesman, said something along the lines of, "It's what Microsoft calls an 'Ultra-Mobile PC,' something you carry around to check your e-mail and browse the Web." My fellow passengers seemed impressed.

When I got to the stadium and had to show the contents of my bag to the folks checking for smuggled drinks at the front, the Q1 had a similar effect. The lady who inspected by belongings eyed it appreciatively and said, "That's cute!"

Those, unfortunately, were about the only times this device made any sort of positive impression on me.

As you might be able to tell from my review yesterday, this was the worst product I've reviewed in a long time, possibly years. It may very well be Microsoft's biggest blunder since Microsoft Bob -- the cartoonish interface for Windows that launched with a massive PR blitz and then promptly went down the toilet, sales-wise.

The sheer awfulness of the Q1 did lead to some interesting rethinking on my part of the last few miniaturized Web-enabled computers that I've tried -- the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, the OQO palmtop and Toshiba Libretto U100 laptop.

The OQO most closely resembles the Q1, thanks to its too-high price and painfully small screen. But at least it has a keyboard -- plus a nifty software utility that lets you select a higher screen resolution, then view only a fraction of it on the screen.

The Libretto, nasty keyboard aside, is a much better take-everywhere computer. On the other hand, if you do want to carry around a Web-specific device, the Nokia 770 is a much better and vastly cheaper choice than the Q1. (Well, if Nokia can deliver updated software later this year that addresses the bugs and flaws that I found.)

Tax Travails: The 2006 Edition

One of the lesser-known perks of living in the Commonwealth of Virginia is the extra half-month to file your taxes -- you don't need to ship the paperwork (or upload the bits) to Richmond until May 1. This year, I again took full advantage of the opportunity to not think about that for an extra couple of weeks.

And so Monday morning found me double-checking our Virginia return in TurboTax, then frowning as it flagged two errors that would keep me from filing electronically. One couldn't be helped -- a tax deduction we took for buying a hybrid car last year. The other couldn't be explained -- over $1,000 in mysterious "other withholding."

Clicking the "Go to Forms" button revealed the line where that item appeared in my Virginia form, but not where it had come from originally. (I don't know why you can't double-click a number in the form to jump to the relevant part of TurboTax's interview screens. Sure would help ... but I digress.)

I felt instantly queasy as I realized the source of this number had to be in the federal return -- the one I'd filed weeks earlier, and which had yielded us an unexpected but much-appreciated refund.

I began clicking through the same interview screens I'd hoped to avoid seeing for another nine months at the very least. The W-2 forms all showed the right balance, and I couldn't have had any other source of withholding. So whence this "other"?

The "Search For a Topic ..." button was no help, since it only located the places where I *could* have entered this data, not where it actually was. Having exhausted the "Income" chapter, I turned to "Taxes and Credits" and still found nothing, then finally checked under "Deductions." Two or three screens deep, I found the incorrect item.

My only guess for how it got there: When TurboTax imported my Quicken tax-relevant data, it must have somehow forgotten to match this withholding with what appeared on our W-2 forms. And yet it never thought to flag this or inquire why I'd have such a high figure for withholding not backed up on any W-2s, even though it asked any number of nit-picking questions about far smaller totals for business expenses listed elsewhere.

Great, just great.

It was time to make the acquaintance of my new friend, Schedule 1040X, "Amended U.S. Individual Tax Return."

I battled through that document's required data entry with some pretty inadequate help from TurboTax (its explanations of what numbers were asked for in which places fell far short of the advice offered for the usual 1040 form). But I eventually got the thing done and shipped the damn thing off to the feds, complete with a big fat check to cover the incorrect refund (it had landed in our bank account a few days before), the taxes we'd owed all along and about $11 in interest.

At least I got the Virginia return filled our correctly -- or so I hope.

Now, I could have caught the mistake the first time around. Maybe I would have -- if I hadn't had to spend hours fussing over the meaningless distinctions the tax system imposes on income and expenses.

Ever year, I seethe in frustration at this needless complexity. I hate poorly optimized code and awkward user interfaces, and you'll never find a worse example of either than the tax code.

By sorting income and profits into dozens, if not hundreds of different categories, then filing expenses and costs into even more little boxes on a chart, these laws try to advance theoretically worthwhile social goals. But they're too complex for people with day jobs to keep track of. All they do is gum up the works at tax time.

(On the other hand, as the tax code becomes an increasingly accepted way to channel financial favors from the government, there's ever more demand for Jack Abramoffs to get more and better tax breaks written into law.)

There is one organization that came out looking good in my sorry little saga, however -- the IRS itself: When I called for help on filling out the 1040X last week, the people there picked up the phone immediately -- no hold music there -- and were polite and informative. I wish every interaction on the phone with a computer manufacturer could have been as efficient and productive.

Sunday Roundup

Besides my Samsung Q1 review, yesterday's Sunday Business section featured:

* Frank Ahrens's Web Watch column, in which he takes note of Cinco de Mayo by covering an interesting Web experiment in Mexican-American dialogue;

* A look at a family-friendly Web search service;

* Help File, where I reissue some advice about cleaning up and, more important, avoiding spyware.

Questions? Comments? Send them to rob@twp.com.