The techno-savvy middle-class marketplace in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia seems to have an almost unlimited capacity to acquire sexy, new electronic gadgets — from iPods to PDAs, from the latest multi-function cell-phone, to the latest N-megapixel digital camera. I’m as guilty as the rest: I’ve just recently acquired a Nikon CoolPix P3 with a 2GB memory card, because it has (a) a WiFi connection to my desktop computer, for faster uploads of digital images, (b) it has Nikon’s version of “vibration reduction” (VR) which supposedly reduces the effect of “camera shake,” and (c) the 2GB memory card allows me to take 578 high-resolution pictures, thus eliminating my paranoia that I’m going to run out of room for taking pictures while tramping through the Amazon jungles. The cost of this camera+memory: approximately $449, from Amazon.

As long as it’s under $500, an attractively large percentage of the marketplace seems to mutter to itself, “Cool! Not sure if I really need this, or if it will really be as revolutionary as they claim — but, hey, why not give it a try?” That rationale has justified my acquisition of several digital cameras over the past 5 years, not to mention the Apple Newton, various Palm Pilots, smart cell phones, iPods, and various other gadgets, all the way back to the Sony Walkman and the $600 hand-held Texas Instruments programmable calculators. Except for a few gadgets like the TI calculator, they’ve all been priced under $500; and in many cases, they’ve been down in the $200 range.

I mention all this because I was intrigued by David Pogue’s review of Microsoft’s Ultra Mobile PC in the May 4th New York Times (see “A Big Question Unanswered by a Tiny PC“). Pogue was singularly unimpressed with the first commercially available implementation of the Microsoft ultra-mobile spec, a device from Samsung called the Q1. I’ll let you read the details in his article, but this will give you the flavor: “… It’s sad … that the Ultra Mobile PC feels so wrong. It aims to bridge the size gulf between a palmtop and a laptop, but winds up inheriting the worst aspects of each.”

I don’t have a Q1, so I can’t offer a personal confirmation or rebuttal of Pogue’s assessment. But here’s the key point: the chances that I would ever buy one, just to play with, are close to zero. The Q1 costs approximately $1,100 — and that doesn’t include the few hundred additional dollars that one would almost certainly have to spend for options like an external hard drive. What on earth were the Samsung people thinking? Was this, perhaps, just a prototype, an experimental clunker that will be followed by an improved $500 version? If so, they would have been better off trying it out in a test marketplace like Mongolia, so the David Pogues of the industry wouldn’t feel compelled to write such a harsh review.

I can’t help wondering if Steve Jobs is chuckling about all of this, while his loyal crew of gadget-designers toil away at the design of the next-generation iPod/Newton/Powerbook. And somewhere, in a garage in Silicon Valley, or Bangalore, or Shanghai, a couple of techie nerds are probably experimenting with the “disruptive technology” that will eventually replace today’s laptop. According to Clayton Christenson’s definition of the term (see his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma), such a technology has to offer approximately 80% of the functionality of its predecessor, for approximately 20% of the price. A typical well-equipped laptop costs about $2,000-2,500 today; so the disruptive device has to be in the price range of … oh, my, isn’t that interesting: $400-500!

The big question, of course, is which 80% of the current laptop’s capabilities do you have to put into the disruptive-technology device? I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I’m not a representative of the teenage/twenty-something generation that will probably buy most of the new devices. If I were Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or the executives from Samsung, I would be organizing focus groups of affluent, techno-savvy teenagers and young adults in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, and Helsinki. Steve, Bill, and the Samsung executives might not like to hear what they have to say, but I’ll bet it would be revolutionary.