Samsung Ativ Smart PC

Where many of the Windows 8 tablets at this year’s IFA have gone the high-end route, Samsung’s Ativ Smart PC is first glimpse of a more mainstream option. With a “next-generation” Atom, aka Intel Clover Trail, taking pride of place alongside a modest all-round specification, this 11.6in convertible should hit retail at well under the £1,000 mark.
Unlike its Sony, Dell and Toshiba-branded Windows 8 competitors, Samsung’s opted for the Asus Transformer school of convertible tablet design: the 750g slate slots into a 748g keyboard dock, which makes for a claimed travelling weight of 1.48kg. It’s good to see that a stylus has made the grade, too, with the S Pen stashing away neatly in the tablet’s bottom corner.
The expanse of glossy white looks striking, but up close it’s obviously a budget model. The keyboard is plasticky, and while the layout is nice and spacious, the overall feel is decidedly average. And while the tablet itself feels a little more solid initially, it’s not perfect: give it a squeeze, and the plastic rear flexes inwards.
The 11.6in display’s low 1,366 x 768 resolution is the other clue as to the Smart PC’s built-to-a-budget beginnings. Still, image quality was pretty good, even under the hall’s spotlights, thanks to Samsung’s decision to use its own IPS-quality PLS panel technology and an LED backlight rated up to 400cd/m2.
Look around the tablet’s 9.9mm-thick edges, and there’s a modicum of connectivity scattered about. A single USB 2 port is present on the tablet itself, with another two spread across the keyboard dock’s opposite edges. Back on the tablet itself, there are micro-HDMI and microSD slots, as well as a SIM slot for the 3G and 4G versions. Ethernet is provided via a USB dongle, with dual-band 802.11n and Bluetooth 4 to soften the blow, and the more security minded will welcome the presence of a TPM 2 chip.
Inside, the dual-core Intel Atom Z2760 CPU partners with 2GB of low-voltage LPDDR memory and 128GB of eMMC solid-state storage. In our brief time with the Smart PC, the new Atom platform seemed perfectly capable of running Windows 8 smoothly. Granted, it lacks the fluidity of the Core i5 and i7 slates we’ve seen, and we saw a slight hint of stutter once we set multiple Office apps opening at once, but it’s not bad at all.