This is a companion paper of a recent one, entitled Integral concentration of idempotent trigonometric polynomials with gaps. New results of the present work concern L 1 concentration, while the above mentioned paper deals with L p -concentration.Our aim here is two-fold. At the first place we try to explain methods and results, and give further straightforward corollaries. On the other hand, we push forward the methods to obtain a better constant for the possible concentration (in L 1 norm) of an idempotent on an arbitrary symmetric measurable set of positive measure. We prove a rather high level γ 1 > 0.96, which contradicts strongly the conjecture of Anderson et al. that there is no positive concentration in L 1 norm.The same problem is considered on the group Z/qZ, with q say a prime number. There, the property of absolute integral concentration of idempotent polynomials fails, which is in a way a positive answer to the conjecture mentioned above. Our proof uses recent results of B. Green and S. Konyagin on the Littlewood Problem.