But just how good is Chrome? How does it differ from IE and from less popular, but still important, browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari?

I’ve been testing Chrome for about a week, trying out all its features and using it side by side with Microsoft’s latest iteration of IE, which came out just last week.

My verdict: Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version — which is just a beta, or test, release — is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later. These omissions include a way to manage bookmarks, a command for emailing links and pages directly from the browser, and even a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded.

Chrome’s interface has some bold changes from the standard browser design. These new features enhance the Web experience, but they will require some adjustment on the part of users. For instance, Chrome does away with most menus and toolbar icons to give maximum screen space for the Web pages themselves. Also, Google has merged the address bar, where you type in Web addresses, with the search box, where you type in search terms. This unified feature is called the Omnibox.

One striking difference in Chrome is how it handles tabs, which display a single Web page. In Chrome, each tab behaves as a separate browser. The bookmarks bar, Omnibox, menus and toolbar icons are located inside the tab, rather than atop the entire browser. The tabs appear at the top of the computer screen. Chrome also groups related tabs. If you open a new tab from a link in a page that’s already open, that new tab appears next to the originating page, rather than at the end of the row of tabs.

Despite Google’s claims that Chrome is fast, it was notably slower in my tests at the common task of launching Web pages than either Firefox or Safari. However, it proved faster than the latest version of IE — also a beta version — called IE8.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t been sitting still. The second beta version of IE8 is the best edition of Internet Explorer in years. It is packed with new features of its own, some of which are similar to those in Chrome, and some of which, in my view, top Chrome’s features.

Google’s Chrome browser displays thumbnails of a user’s most-visited pages when a new tab is opened, rather than a blank page.

For example, while IE8 also groups related tabs, it assigns a different color to each such tab group and allows you to close them all with one click. It has a “smart” address box of its own, that drops down a list of suggestions as you type, though it retains a separate search box.

IE8 also has breakthrough privacy features that exceed Chrome’s, and includes a new technology called Accelerators, which allows you to take rapid action on any selected word or phrase on a Web page, such as generating a map for a place name, without switching to a new page.

As they develop, each of these browsers has a good chance of besting Firefox 3.0, which I have regarded as the best Web browser for Windows, the only operating system on which Chrome currently runs. But they will have to get faster at loading pages. And, to best Firefox on the Macintosh, Google will have to make good on its promise to produce a Mac version of Chrome, something it says it will do in the coming months. Microsoft has no plans to produce a Mac version of IE8.

Chrome and IE8 are far more advanced than Apple’s Safari. Safari is speedy on both Mac and Windows platforms, but lacks many of the key intelligent features of its newer Google and Microsoft rivals.

Why is Google igniting a new browser war? There are two main reasons, and both involve competing with Microsoft. First, the search giant fears that because its search engine and other major products depend on the browser, Microsoft — with its rival online products — might be able to gain an advantage by altering the design of IE, which has roughly a 75% market share.

Second, and more important, Google sees the Web as a platform for the software programs, or applications, that currently run directly on computer operating systems, notably Microsoft’s Windows. It says current browsers lack the underlying architecture to enable future, more powerful Web applications that will rely more heavily on a common Web programming language called JavaScript. Chrome was designed to be the world’s speediest browser at handling JavaScript.

That move might one day make Chrome a sort of online operating system that competes with Windows. “Think of Chrome as more than a simple Web browser,” Google declares. “It’s a platform for running Web applications.”

Microsoft’s IE8 has an “Accelerator” feature that lets users select any Web text and then map, translate, search or email their selection without leaving the page.

I tested Chrome, and IE8, on a plain-vanilla Lenovo ThinkPad laptop running Windows XP, and equipped with a modest processor and one gigabyte of memory.

To gauge Chrome’s speed at loading Web pages, I launched two large groups of typical Web pages simultaneously, each site opening in its own tab. One group included 15 sports sites, the second 19 news sites. In both tests, Chrome’s speed fell in the middle, at 35 and 44 seconds, respectively. IE8 was slower, taking 49 and 75 seconds to open the two groups of sites. But Firefox and Safari were much faster, notching identical speeds of 19 seconds for the 15 sites and 28 seconds for the 19 sites.

Google claims that future, more sophisticated Web applications relying more heavily on JavaScript than today’s sites do would run faster on Chrome. Of course, I couldn’t test any claim about future scenarios, but I did run Chrome on several JavaScript test sites, used by developers. It handily beat the other browsers. However, Google doesn’t claim users would see much difference on current Web application sites.

I also tested Chrome’s compatibility with scores of common Web sites. In general, it did well, rendering the sites properly. But I ran into problems with video. Some video sites refused to recognize Chrome, because its development has been a secret. On others, like Major League Baseball’s site, videos mostly played properly, but sometimes didn’t.

IE8 also has some compatibility issues, for different reasons. It’s the first version of Internet Explorer to hew closely to Web standards. Earlier versions used some nonstandard ways of rendering Web sites, prompting some site designers to adopt techniques that made their pages work in IE, but look odd in Firefox and Safari. Now, ironically, these pages also look strange in IE8. So Microsoft was forced to build in a special Compatibility View button that users must click to see the sites properly.

Chrome is built on three core design principles. The first is its spare user interface: just two menus and a handful of toolbar icons. IE introduced a similar approach in its version 7, but with a difference. Microsoft allows users to restore a traditional menu bar; Google doesn’t. The only toolbar icon you can add in Chrome is a Home button.

The second principle is that a user can type anything into a single place, the Omnibox, and instantly get suggestions on where to go, gleaned from the user’s own browsing history and Google’s rankings of popular sites. Whether you type in a Web address or a search term, the Omnibox is very smart. In my tests, it sometimes came up with the right destination after I typed only one or two letters of the name of a site I often visited.

The Omnibox has another cool feature: Tab-to-Search. If you type in the name of another site that includes its own search feature, like Amazon.com, the Omnibox lets you just press the tab key to search within that site, without opening it first. Chrome, through its Options settings, also lets you change the default search engine used by the Omnibox. Instead of Google’s own search service, you can use Microsoft’s Live search, Yahoo search, or others.

The third big principle behind Chrome is that each tab runs, under the hood, as a separate browser. Tabs can be dragged off the main browser and turned into separate windows. If one tab crashes, the rest of the browser keeps running. But this doesn’t work perfectly. In my tests, all of Chrome died on me when I tried watching an Olympics video on the NBC site.

You can even make a tab a standalone application that runs from the Start Menu, or the desktop, as if it was a separate program.

Chrome has a few other key features. When you open a new tab, you don’t get a blank page, but a set of thumbnails for your most-visited pages, plus lists of recent search engines you’ve used, recently used bookmarks and recently closed tabs.

Like other browsers, Chrome puts up a warning when you try to visit a malicious or phony Web site, and it has a private browsing mode, called Incognito, which allows you to browse without leaving any history on your computer — a feature popularized in Safari.

Chrome also has a pop-up blocker, but it’s annoying because it flashes a notice that a pop-up has been blocked. IE also does this, but unlike in Chrome, the warnings are much less intrusive.

Internet Explorer 8 has some new features Chrome lacks. Its private browsing mode, called InPrivate, is the first I’ve seen that not only leaves no traces on your own computer, but also bars Web sites from collecting some types of information on where you’ve previously been surfing.

While IE8’s address box and search box remain separate, each also offers rapid suggestions; and both are organized better than Chrome’s. For instance, the suggestions that drop down from its address bar are divided neatly into categories drawn from the browser’s own guess, your history and your favorites. One downside: For this to work in Windows XP, you must first install Microsoft’s desktop search product.

Like Chrome, IE8 lets you switch your default search provider, but it also allows you to switch search engines on the fly. When you type in a search term, icons for alternate search engines appear at the bottom of the suggestion list, and you need only click on these to see search results from, say, Google, instead of Microsoft’s own Live search engine.

IE8’s Accelerators feature presents a blue-arrow icon above any text on a Web page that you have selected. Clicking on the icon brings up a list of actions you can take using the selected text, such as posting it to a blog, emailing it, mapping it or searching it. While these actions are set by default to use Microsoft’s own Web services, you can change them to use Google’s, Yahoo’s, or those from other companies.

Microsoft also has built in a feature called Web Slices. These are portions of a Web site that a site developer can designate to appear in the IE8 Favorites bar and to constantly update themselves. An example might be bidding on eBay.

Like Chrome, IE8 also displays useful information whenever you create a new tab, including a list of recently closed tabs and a list of Accelerators.

With the emergence of Chrome, consumers have a new and innovative browser choice, and with IE8, the new browser war is sure to be a worthy contest.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Beginning this summer, as soon as next month, wireless Internet access will arrive in the passenger cabins of some commercial U.S. airliners.

On these Internet-equipped planes, any passenger with a Wi-Fi enabled laptop — or a cellphone with Wi-Fi — will be able to do almost everything he or she could do online at home or at the office. That includes surfing the Web, using email, having instant-messenger text chats, downloading and uploading files, and streaming video and audio.

In fact, I did all these things a few days ago on a test flight using the new system, called Gogo. During the flight from San Francisco to Denver, on a small test jet, I could operate online as if I were sitting at my desk, or in a Starbucks. I used Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) laptops, a BlackBerry (RIMM), a Windows Mobile phone and an iPhone to perform all the most common online tasks, while soaring over majestic mountains and glorious national parks.

I sent and received emails on Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook and Apple Mail, including messages with hefty attachments. I conducted IM chats on AOL (TWX) Instant Messenger and Google (GOOG) Talk. Using all the major Web browsers, I called up dozens of Web sites, and watched video clips on Hulu and YouTube. I downloaded photos, songs, PDF files and Microsoft Office documents. I used all the Internet functions on the iPhone, and on the Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phone.

One important caveat: Gogo is a data-only system. It doesn’t allow phone calls and will block all services that allow voice conversations to be made over the Internet.

Gogo will launch on three American Airlines (AMR) routes, likely in July. The first planes to use it will be American’s 15 Boeing 767s flying between New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Later in the year, Gogo will be available on all of Virgin America’s small number of routes, and possibly additional American routes, if the first deployment works well. It’s supplied to the airlines by a Denver-based company called Aircell, which says it is in negotiations to offer the Gogo service on several other major U.S. airlines by next year.

The Gogo service will cost a flat fee of $12.95 for flights of three hours or longer, and $9.95 for shorter trips. You log into Gogo as you would any commercial Internet service, registering on a special Web page. Aircell plans to allow advance sign-up, so you’d only have to enter an ID and password on the plane. No add-on software, hardware or cables are required.

A few Web functions will be offered free from Gogo, including access to the American Airlines Web site, to Frommer’s online travel guides and to a limited selection of articles from The Wall Street Journal.

Gogo isn’t the first in-plane Internet service. A few years ago, Lufthansa (LHA.MU) offered a satellite-based service from Boeing (BA), mainly on over-ocean flights, but it was canceled.

The service operates at respectable, if not blazing, speeds — similar to what you’d get on a cellular broadband service or a slow home DSL line. On my test flight, download speeds varied from 266 kilobits per second to about 1.4 megabits per second, with the most typical speeds hovering between 500 and 600 kbps. Upload speeds were between 250 and 300 kbps. I found that most of the tasks I tested, except for streaming video, felt smooth and normal.

Speeds could degrade on a large plane with scores of people online simultaneously. But Aircell claims it has the technology to make my experience representative for anyone doing common tasks, such as Web surfing and email. During my test flight, eight laptops and six Wi-Fi-enabled smart phones were using the system simultaneously. All registered decent speeds, except for a couple of minutes when the plane was crossing between the zones controlled by the company’s ground-based towers.

Aircell gets Internet access to the planes through a network of 92 towers scattered across North America. These essentially are cellphone towers, carrying a high-speed cellphone data signal, except that the Aircell antennas point up, into the sky. A receiver on the underside of the aircraft picks up the signal, which is then distributed through the plane via Wi-Fi.

The companies say Gogo is safe and won’t interfere with the plane’s operation. It is government-approved, and pilots can shut the system off should they deem it necessary.

Gogo has some limitations. The service plans to allocate its capacity so that low-bandwidth activities like Web surfing and email take priority over high-bandwidth ones like streaming video. That means you may find video to be slow and halting.

And Gogo is a North American, land-based service only. It won’t work over the oceans and, for now, it won’t work on other continents.

But for U.S. travelers who want to stay connected in the air, Gogo does the job.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Forget next month. It’s more fun thinking about what digital toys Apple might be making in five years. Of course, Mr. Jobs’s penchant for secrecy means such predictions are often little more than daydreaming. Just do an Internet search for “Apple” and “mockup” to see photos of products invented by Apple fans.

Forrester Research (FORR) is the latest to look into the crystal ball in a new report that imagines the Apple products of 2013. But rather than predict Apple jet packs or other outlandish new directions, the research firm uses the company’s recent history as a guide to forecasting.

Forrester’s conclusion: While much of Apple’s great successes have been mobile products such as the iPod and the iPhone, the company will seek to colonize rooms throughout the home.

Among the new products Forrester predicts Apple will create are wall-mountable digital picture frames with small high-definition screens and speakers that wirelessly play media, including photos, videos and music, stored on a computer elsewhere in the home. Such products already exist, but Apple could put its own twist on them — for example, by adding its design panache and a touch-sensitive screen that lets viewers flip from image to image with a finger swipe, a la the iPhone.

For the bedroom, Forrester envisions an Apple “clock radio” that pipes in music and other media across a home network. Possible, too, is an “AppleSound” universal remote control, also with a touch-sensitive screen, that lets users browse their music collections and change the songs playing through their stereo as they stroll around the house. This latter technology is already available in primitive form through an application called Signal (www.alloysoft.com) that turns the iPod touch and the iPhone into remote controls for Apple’s iTunes program.

Forrester also thinks Apple could extend into the home the technical assistance currently offered by “Genius Bar” personnel in Apple retail stores. Apple in-home installation services will become especially important as its array of products for the home grows. “The complexity level here can be quite daunting if you have five or six of these different devices,” says J.P. Gownder, one of the Forrester analysts who wrote the report.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s product plans.

Apple prognosticating is such a popular pastime, in part, because Mr. Jobs has proved so adept at becoming a power broker in markets a Silicon Valley computer company — once known as Apple Computer — has no right to dominate. The iPod remains the top MP3 player, with more than 70% of the market, and Apple is now the top retailer of music in the nation, ahead of Wal-Mart (WMT) Stores. Less than a year after entering the cellphone business with the iPhone, Apple became the second-largest provider of smart phones in the U.S.

That said, the company had an underwhelming foray into the living room with a television set-top device called Apple TV that plays music, photos and movies downloaded from the Internet and PCs on a home network. In an interview earlier this year after dropping the price on the product by $70 to $229, Mr. Jobs said he was disappointed in its sales.

Despite the hiccups, veteran observers of Apple say Mr. Jobs’s intent is clear. “I see everything Steve is doing as positioning himself to take over completely the living room,” says John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and the former director of Xerox’s PARC, the Palo Alto, Calif., research center that inspired some of the innovations of the original Macintosh.

One long-running prediction, proved wrong again and again: that Apple might make a television set. Forrester throws cold water on the idea. Yet some still believe that Apple will one day get into the business as conventional TV makers start to integrate into their sets the ability to surf the Web. Apple already designs computer displays that are as large as some HDTVs.

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple with Mr. Jobs, says it would make “a lot of sense” for Apple to do a television set that can also access media stored on the Internet and local PCs. “I only started thinking that way recently,” Mr. Wozniak says. “Apple is obviously in the world of delivering display devices already.”

Mr. Brown thinks Apple could simplify the traditional functions on TV sets, like the bewildering electronic programming guides that list the hundreds of channels available to viewers. “Most people find operating high-quality TV systems incredibly awkward,” he says. “They’re as bad as our computer systems.”

• Send comments to Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com. Walter S. Mossberg will return on June 5.

These types of attacks are called “social engineering,” and they are used by criminals to steal your money and identity, and to plant on your computer malicious software that can be used to keep ripping you off. Social engineering is the online equivalent of an old-fashioned con game, in which a crook frightens people with false warnings, or tempts them with false promises, and then robs them.

While viruses and spyware overwhelmingly afflict Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows users and spare users of Apple’s (AAPL) Macintosh computers, social-engineering schemes can ensnare Mac users as well. There’s nothing inherent in Macs that makes their owners more resistant to falling for social-engineering scams.

The most common form of social engineering is called phishing, a one-two punch using both email and Web browsing to trick people into typing confidential information into Web sites that look like the sites of real companies, especially financial institutions. But these phishing sites are actually skillfully designed fakes that transmit your sensitive data to criminals, often in distant countries. Once these creeps have your passwords and account numbers, they can loot your funds and steal your identity.

Here are some tips to help you avoid being the victim of social engineering, updated from a similar column I wrote in 2006. It includes information on some antiphishing software that wasn’t available back then. But remember: Security software alone can’t save you from scams.

1. Never, ever click on a link embedded in an email that appears to come from a financial institution, even if it’s your own bank or brokerage and even if it looks official right down to the logo. The same goes for payment or auction services, like PayPal or eBay (EBAY). Don’t do this even if the email asserts that your account has a problem, or that the bank has to verify your information. And certainly don’t enter any passwords, Social Security numbers or account numbers directly in an email.

These types of emails are almost always fakes, and the links they contain almost always lead to phony Web sites run by criminals. The only exception might be a confirmation email from a brokerage firm concerning a trade you know you made minutes before. Even legitimate-looking addresses in emails or in the address bar of Web browsers can be fakes that hide the crooks’ true Web addresses. The lock icon on a Web site can also be falsified.

If you are truly worried about your account, call the bank or company, or go to its Web site by manually typing in its address or by using a well-established bookmark in your browser that you created yourself.

2. Don’t click on links to offers for free software or goods that you receive in an email, especially from a sender or company you’ve never heard of.

3. Never download software from unfamiliar Web sites unless you are absolutely sure you need it and it’s legitimate. Even if it claims to be a useful program, it may very well be a malicious application like a “key logger,” which can report back to crooks everything you type into your computer. If you really want the program, do a Web search on it first, to see if others have reported it as a malicious fake.

4. If a Web site tells you that you need to download special viewing software to see its videos, don’t do it. Even if it claims to be giving you legitimate viewing software, like Microsoft’s Silverlight, Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash or Apple’s QuickTime, don’t download it there. Go to the official Microsoft, Adobe or Apple Web sites to get these viewers.

5. Use a Web browser, like Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, or Firefox 2.0 on Windows or Mac, that includes built-in features to warn you about, or block access to, known phishing sites. The next versions of these two browsers will have even stronger features that will detect sites that are not only fake, but which are known to distribute malicious software.

Unfortunately, the third major browser, Apple’s otherwise excellent Safari for Mac and Windows, lacks any such antiphishing detection, though I expect Apple to add the feature in a future version. So, for now, Mac users worried about phishing should rely on Firefox.

6. Consider security software that tries to detect and block phishing sites. McAfee’s (MFE) free Site Advisor and paid Site Advisor Plus products do a good job. Symantec (SYMC) has similar features built into its large security suites, Norton 360 2.0 and Norton Internet Security 2008.

7. Educate yourself by reading about social engineering and phishing and how to avoid being a victim. Microsoft has a very good guide at: microsoft.com/protect/yourself/phishing/identify.mspx and Symantec has one at: symantec.com/norton/clubsymantec/library/article.jsp?aid=cs_phishing.

Follow these tips and you’ll be a happier — and safer — surfer.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

• Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

The closest contenders are the smart phones, like Palm’s Treo models. But these devices are generally poor at one of the most important tasks people do on their computers — browsing the Internet. Because their screens are so small, they either render Web pages in a manner never intended by their designers, or they require a ton of tedious horizontal scrolling to view the page.

Now, Nokia, the big phone maker, has come out with a $360 pocket computer that aims to solve that problem. It’s called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and, true to its name, it concentrates on surfing the Web. The 770 can also send and receive email and instant messages, view images and videos, and play music and simple games. But its focus is on displaying Web sites really well.

The 770 has been popular in Europe, at least among techies, but has had little impact so far in the U.S., where it is available only via Nokia’s Web site (nokiausa.com/770) and a few other online outlets, such as Amazon.com.

Since Nokia is a cellphone maker, it’s odd that the 770 has no cellphone radio inside and can’t connect to the Internet via the latest cellphone networks, which now boast broadband speeds. Instead, it relies on Wi-Fi wireless networking, which is faster but much less ubiquitous than cellphone networks. It’s possible to connect a cellphone to the 770 and indirectly use a cellphone network, but as with all such setups, this is a clumsy approach.

I have been testing the 770, and I found that it performs its main function, Web browsing, better than any other pocket device I’ve tried. But it falls down badly on many other tasks, partly because of kludgy software and partly because it is agonizingly slow at almost everything other than surfing the Web.

The best thing about the Nokia 770 is the hardware design. It’s a sleek, thin, horizontally oriented device with a handsome black-matte finish and a small number of silver-colored buttons. It weighs just 8.1 ounces, and is only 5.5 inches long and 0.7 inch thick.

Most of the surface is occupied by the very vivid, bright display, which boasts by far the highest resolution I have seen on a hand-held digital device — 800×480, enough to display photos and videos really well and to view many Web pages without scrolling. This is a higher resolution than many Windows PCs commonly used 10 years ago.

By contrast, the screen on the Sony PSP portable game player, generally hailed as excellent, has a resolution of just 480×272, although it’s roughly the same size as the screen on the Nokia. And the screen on the Treo 700p, which has the best resolution of any smart phone display, is just 320×320.

Text looks very sharp on the 770, but it can be too small to read easily. To help with that, Nokia has placed buttons on the top edge of the device that can quickly zoom the display in and out, and put the device into full-screen mode, banishing all menus and icons temporarily.

Unfortunately, this beautiful exterior hardware is served poorly by the software, and by the processor and memory beneath the covers, which are easily overwhelmed.

Using the 770’s Web browser, I was able to successfully, and fairly quickly, call up a wide variety of sites, and all the ones I tried were rendered just as they would be on a regular computer.

In most cases, even though no horizontal scrolling was needed to read the pages, I often had to use the zoom feature to make out small text. Vertical scrolling using the stylus was easy. You can also skip from link to link on a Web page using the gadget’s five-way navigation control pad.

But the email program was so slow as to be essentially useless. Even simple tasks like selecting and deleting emails take forever. There’s another reason the 770 isn’t a very good email device: Unlike the Treo, the 770 lacks a keyboard; so you have to tap out emails on an onscreen keyboard or use handwriting recognition, which wasn’t great.

The image viewer, and video and music players, worked pretty well with pictures, song files and video clips I copied to the 770’s storage card from my Macintosh via an included USB cable. But I couldn’t figure out how to do some simple things, like rotating a photo.

The user interface is confusing. The same icon is used for both the Web browser and for turning on the Wi-Fi connection. The email program is buried in the Contact menu and the picture viewer is buried in a Utilities menu.

There are many more software oddities. The 770 also uses an unusual, hard-to-find type of memory card for data storage — a “reduced-size” Multimedia card.

If you are a gadget geek, or just want to surf the Web on a small device with a great screen, the 770 might be for you. But for most mainstream users, the 770 is a disappointment. With more horsepower and a revamped interface, it might get closer to the holy grail.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

Apple and Sony are the usual suspects. Microsoft and Intel, which dominate the industry, rarely make the list of design risk-takers. So the latter two leaders deserve credit for cooking up a whole new type of Windows computer — a machine that’s smaller than the smallest mainstream laptop — the Ultra Mobile PC, or UMPC. The first UMPC for the U.S. market, the Samsung Q1, goes on sale next week at Best Buy’s Web site.

The idea behind the UMPC is that it’s so small, yet so full-featured, it can replace a laptop. It’s meant to fit in places a laptop won’t, or simply to be held in your hands. It is also supposed to be a cool multimedia device for watching video or listening to music.

Unfortunately, the Samsung Q1 is so deeply flawed in key respects that it amounts to little more than a toy for techies. For everyone else, it’s impractical and frustrating. Unless the UMPC can evolve significantly beyond this first effort, it may wind up as a footnote in the history of personal computers, rather than an exciting new category.

The Q1 is sleek and attractive. It’s about the size of a hardcover book, only narrower, and is clad in shiny black plastic with silver accents. Most of the unit is occupied by a wide-angle color touch screen that measures 7 inches diagonally. Overall, it’s about 9 inches long, 5.5 inches wide and just under an inch thick. It weighs a scant 1.7 pounds.

Inside, the little machine runs a full version of the Tablet edition of Windows XP. In fact, the UMPC, which Microsoft had code-named Origami, is really just a small Tablet PC. That’s a good thing, because many of the Tablets shipped so far have been too big and bulky to use comfortably as electronic notepads or document readers, which are the main functions of tablet computers.

The Q1 uses a slow, low-end Intel processor, a Celeron running at 900 megahertz. But it was adequate for the common tasks I tested — Web surfing, email, playback of audio and video files. There’s also a 40 gigabyte hard disk, 512 megabytes of memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking, an Ethernet port, two USB ports and a slot for Compact Flash memory cards.

There’s no embedded cellphone modem and no slot for adding an external one. The Q1 also lacks an internal DVD drive. An external drive can be added for $219, but it’s an extra piece to carry and plug in.

You operate the Q1 like a PDA — by manipulating icons on the screen and writing on the screen using either a simple plastic stylus or your fingers. It lacks a built-in keyboard and doesn’t come with a mouse.

In my tests, the Wi-Fi and wired networking worked well and were fast. All the applications I tried launched fine and worked fine. Video clips looked pretty good on the screen, and the stereo speakers, though small, did a decent job.

So what are the Q1’s big flaws? The first is price. Microsoft’s designers set a target retail price of $500, but Samsung is charging more than double that amount — $1,099. That’s more than many laptops cost, and much more than PDAs or smart phones. In fairness, the lightest laptops tend to cost more — $1,500 to $2,500. But $1,099 is still a lot for a UMPC.

The second is battery life. In my harsh battery test, the Q1 lasted just two hours and two minutes. That means that, in normal use, it might approach three hours, if you’re lucky. You can buy a larger battery for $119, but it adds bulk to the computer and nudges the weight up to two pounds, almost as heavy as the lightest standard laptops.

The third is the lack of a keyboard. Without a keyboard, many standard tasks in Windows are simply a huge hassle. You can’t really do word processing at speeds most people are used to. And email is a constant frustration. Yes, the Q1 has handwriting recognition, but it’s cumbersome. And there’s a semicircular onscreen keyboard, but it takes work to use it well.

Most Tablet PCs include a keyboard. Even the tiny OQO computer has a keyboard, as do Treos and BlackBerrys. How come the combined brains at Microsoft, Intel and Samsung couldn’t build one into the Q1? You can plug in an external keyboard, but that makes the machine ungainly.

The fourth big flaw is the screen. Its resolution is too low to see much material at a glance. Often, you can’t even see the OK button at the bottom of open Windows. There is a way to increase the resolution, but it results in distorted graphics and fuzzy text.

Finally, the navigation buttons and controls on the Q1 are awful. There’s a control that moves the cursor, and another that acts like a Return key. But there are no direct equivalents of the left and right mouse buttons. To emulate a mouse button, you have to hold down two of the Q1 buttons simultaneously.

My advice is to skip the Q1, and hope that the next generation of the UMPC will be better.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

The movement for such “information appliances,” which I supported, was especially strong in the early and mid-1990s, when computers running Microsoft Windows were far more complicated and crash-prone than they are today.

Several companies tried to build desktop and laptop-computer-size information appliances, but none of the designs captivated the public, and they cost almost as much as a cheap PC. The movement lost steam by 2001, when both Microsoft and Apple Computer were producing better-designed, more stable PC operating systems.

The Pepper Pad, which can play music, surf the Web

Information appliances actually did arrive, but in a different guise — the smart cellphone and the advanced personal digital assistant, or PDA. These hand-held devices are gradually accumulating the hardware power and software selection needed to do most core PC tasks, like Web surfing, email and even document creation.

Now, however, a small Massachusetts startup company is making another go at the full-size information appliance. The company, Pepper Computer, is launching a slick-looking tablet device called the Pepper Pad, which it hopes will attract PC users and nonusers alike as a simple, convenient tool for using the Internet, playing digital media, keeping a journal and more.

The idea is to offer something as convenient and simple as a Web-connected PDA without the complexity and security problems of a PC. The rugged device even has a tiny, built-in keyboard that can be used for thumb typing. It also comes with desktop software that lets users wirelessly synchronize the Pepper Pad’s contents with a Windows PC (Mac compatibility is in the works).

In my tests of the Pepper Pad over the past few days, I found it mostly did what was promised, but it isn’t quite as easy and intuitive to use as its makers claim. Many of its built-in programs offer limited functionality and seem rough around the edges. And, at $799, it costs more than some laptops and much more than a basic desktop PC.

The Pepper Pad is available at Amazon.com, where preorders are being taken. It is expected to start shipping by the end of this week. More information is available at www.pepper.com.

Unlike some earlier info appliances, the Pepper Pad is able to take advantage of modern technologies developed for the PC. It offers built-in Wi-Fi wireless networking for getting on the Internet at broadband speeds, and Bluetooth short-range wireless networking for hooking up peripherals. It has a slot for the popular SD memory cards used in digital cameras, so you can transfer photos easily. And it has a USB port meant for use with the new little USB thumb drives, so you can easily import photos, music and videos.

Inside is a 20-gigabyte hard drive, the Linux operating system and a Web browser based on the open-source Mozilla code that also underlies the popular Firefox browser.

The silvery unit is horizontally aligned and measures about a foot wide and 6.6 inches high. It is just 0.8-inch thick, and weighs only 2.3 pounds. A large, bright, color touch screen, measuring 8.4 inches diagonally, is flanked by the keypad, which is split into two halves. You navigate through the software by tapping icons with a stylus. You also can use a five-way directional pad or a scroll wheel to navigate.

The battery is sealed and rechargeable, and the company claims it will last for two to three hours of continuous use, which seemed about right from my tests but pretty meager. An internal steel chassis and rubber bumpers make the Pepper Pad pretty rugged.

The user interface is clean and clear. Photo-realistic icons lead you to the main programs: the Web browser, an email program, photo viewer, video player and music player. There is a simple word processor, a few games, an Internet radio program and a program that allows the Pad to be used as a TV remote control.

Throughout the software, the Pepper Pad uses a tabbed interface to organize files, and it has a “Keep” function that allows you to retain copies of Web pages and other material for offline viewing.

The Pepper Pad also has some serious limitations. Its main font is sort of fuzzy-looking, and the capital letter “I” looks like a left-hand bracket symbol. Response times were often slow: Pressing the rubbery keypad keys or tapping on the screen too often yielded no immediate result.

In the photo program, you can’t make your own albums — all pictures can be sorted only by date. The video program can’t play back the two most popular types of digital clips, Microsoft’s Windows Media Video and Apple’s QuickTime. Games were painfully slow to play.

There is no support for printing or for connecting to the Web via a dial-up modem or wired broadband connection, though these are planned. You can’t view or edit common PC documents such as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF files, though this capability is also planned.

In general, I would say the Pepper Pad is too expensive and too limited to fulfill its mission, at least in this first incarnation.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com