Samsung ATIV Touch Screen Smart PC 500T

Comments about Samsung ATIV Touch Screen Smart PC 500T:

I've been a PC user all my life. The Windows 8 Convertible Tablets are what I've been waiting for for over 10 years. In 2002, I had the Toshiba Portege XP Convertible Tablet with Pen input. It was a great device at the time but had poor battery life and no UI enhancements for navigating the OS with the pen and no touch. The Windows 8 Convertible tablets change all that. The Samsing Ativ Smart PC is the first Tablet/PC to include both pen and touch input and has a detachable keyboard. The Lenono IdeaPad2 will also have pen input but no keyboard that I've heard of.

My wife and I each have Windows 7 Laptops. We each have iPads for browsing and FB'ing and watching movies. The Samsung Ativ will combine the best of both worlds. Be warned, though that buyers should make sure they need the power of the Windows 8 desktop and can handle the associated maintenance responsiblities. If you just want a Windows metro device to replace your iPad, go for an RT tablet instead.

Here's why: The RT devices only let you run Windows Store apps and Office. You can't really mess up the device. With a Windows 8 Tablet, you can install (willingly or unwillingly bloatware or drivers that can degrade your system performance.)

For example, not having the proper drivers or running bloated apps like Norton AV (that gets installed by the Samsing update if you use default settings) can dramatically decrease your battery life. These are all things that savvy PC/laptop users have learned to do. You cannot get away from doing this with a win8 tablet. If you don't want to use desktop apps, then get an RT tablet instead. Fortunately, Windows 8 has enhanced power and CPU usage stats to help you find any resource hogs.

After spending hours finally getting all the updates installed, including having to do a factory reset, the device behaves like a dream. The Windows Store apps are really power
efficient. I played Jetpack Joyride for 2 hours straight and only used up 10-15% battery life!

I haven't installed any desktop apps yet since I'm waiting to get the Keyboard dock to finally use it like a laptop. I'm also waiting for Office 2013 to come out in early 2013 since it's optimized for touch. Office 2010 can run with keyboard and mouse but the next Office will make this even more fun to use. I did try a wireless mouse and keyboard via the USB connector. They work ok but without a dock, you can't really prop up the screen on its own.

The bundled pen is also one of the reasons I chose to buy this particular model. Samsung has a free app called SNote. It it the same app on the Galaxy Note, I believe. You can enable/disable touch and use pen only mode for certain pen tasks where you don't want your palm to act as an input device! That really gives you the power and precision of digitizer tablet at the push of an onscreen button. The Pen is also not just a replacement for your finger. I think it's a wacom digitizer. When you hover over the screen, there is a little pointer to show you where the pen will land. Depressing the pen tip will let the "ink" flow. Since you can't really find this device in stores to try out at this time, I figured this description will help those wanting to learn more about the pen.

In summary, this is the device with the best combo of features to date. My wife is claiming this for herself so I might check out some other Windows 8 Pro devices coming out later this year and early next year. Samsung will also launch Core i5 and i7 versions of this device as well.

Comments about Samsung ATIV Touch Screen Smart PC 500T:

Spent over 3 hours over the course of 2 days looking at this tablet.

Performance:
I did not notice any lag or see any performance hiccups, but the in-store wi-fi made a complete evaluation difficult. Using my personal phone as a hot spot proved helpful and having a better connection painted an even more impressive picture.
Sunspider benchmarks are in the low 700ms range, easily beating the newest iPad(850ms).
Web surfing was fluid and gave a real desktop feel, improved upon by effective and fluid touch integration. Flash doesnt work in the tablet-mode browser. I didnt miss it(most sites are moving to HTML 5, including Youtube).

Features:
The S-Pen works great, it may be a gimmick for some, but I found that it is possible to take good,SHARP, hand written notes with it (and some drawing). The display, while not as spectacular in the spec-sheet as other tablets, is clear and sharp.
Full size USB 2.0 port worked with wireless keyboard/mouse combos.
Also Featured were: Micro SD slot, Micro HDMI port, Charger port is a proprietary drum style connector similar to most laptops.

Windows 8 is meant to have touch interaction and this tablet showed me that. Im not clear on the battery life but it is quoted as being at par with iPads, which are currently among the best. I will be purchasing this tablet, for a more in depth at home review. If the impression from the store use holds up I will keep it.

iPad price with 64 GB of storage is 699, 100 dollars more than this machine.

Deciding Factors:
If this tablet has similar or better battery life, I consider it better than an iPad, because it can run PC software, has a full PC browser and Microsoft is the largest ecosystem on the planet, you dont need apps when you have a full web browser and a full desktop OS.

Full Windows 8, this is NOT RT, has Office as a trial, but I did not evaluate.

Comments about Samsung ATIV Touch Screen Smart PC 500T:

I would recommend this Samsung Tablet. Have tried a few others and settled on the Samsung as I have other Samsung products and have had very good luck with them.

NOTE that the dimensions listed (here and at Samsung.com) are not correct. They list the HEIGHT at 3.5 inches. It is more like 7 inches in height.

Battery Life is excellent for a full Windows 8 PC. The Tablet charges very fast also.

Also note this Tablet has Windows 8 (not the RT version) and all older Windows applications can be installed.

Overall this is another Great Samsung product.

Comments about Samsung ATIV Touch Screen Smart PC 500T:

A smooth operating tablet. I bought this one because it has a full Windows 8 OS. It has most of Windows 7 stuff, it's just alittle harder to find. The battery life seems good. The speed seems good with the Atom cpu. Much faster than the old netbooks were. The new Windows 8 tablet interface is good. The graphics are very good. The stylist is very good. The USB port works good on thumb drives and mouse. Also, the bluetooth worked good on my Apple wireless mouse. The micro SD card slot is very handy.

Comments about Samsung ATIV Touch Screen Smart PC 500T:

I have owned all the other operating system tablets including the most popular and this Windows 8 is by far the best. I have owned it for over three weeks.
I have connected a 1 T usb drive, a64 gb SD card, a Bluetooth gps and my Samsung laser printer, and of course a usb thumb drive all with no problems.
When the keyboard dock becomes available, I will finally have the best of both worlds(laptop & tablet). I also like the larger 11.6 screen.
The processor is listed on Staples as 1.5 but it is 1.8. The Atom processor is quite adequate un like the one in earlier net books.
Not allowed to site brand names here so I have owned the popular delicious fruit one and dumped it after five months, just would not do what this one does.

Comments about Samsung ATIV Touch Screen Smart PC 500T:

I've been looking forward to a tablet like this for years, I've always wanted to be able to run windows legacy programs on a tablet and while I've tried a number of previous windows tablets they all lacked an OS that was touch friendly.

The combination of the touch screen and S-Pen with windows 8 I thought would be perfect, the addition of the keyboard dock just sweetened the deal.

However after eagerly awaiting the release (and being disappointed at how little info was available even the day before release) I got my hands on 1, thankfully I was on vacation in California at the time since it took WEEKS for them to be available in Colorado Springs (and they sell out as soon as they get them). I happened to buy the ONLY 1 that staples in San Diego had (How did they only get 1????) but they did not have the keyboard dock, I figured no big deal I'll order one or get one in a store surely within a week... Here it is 11/23/2012 almost an entire month after release and I still CANNOT get a keyboard dock, this is just unacceptable! The vendors listed as "in stock" on samsungs website do not actually have the product "in stock" and confirmed to me that they still have not received a single one! This was a primary reason for purchasing this tablet over other brands was because of the docking keyboard (and yes I have bluetooth keyboards, but I wanted the DOCKING KEYBOARD)

In addition to the absolutely poor release of the product and accessories is the hardware and software issues. The S-Pen driver would crash on a regular basis required disabling/enabling of the driver to get it working again, finally fixed weeks later once again a major part of why I chose this tablet and it's a samsung flagship thing, you'd think they would have tested it before release.
The wifi drivers seemed to work fine at first (connected to many networks without issues) now it will often not connect (or connect and then disconnect) requiring activation of airplane mode to reset the wifi, sometimes this works and sometimes it has to be done 5 or 6 times, sometimes multiple rebooting of both the tablet and wifi networks is required.

I would not recommend this product to ANYONE until samsung figures out if they are going to support this product with accessories and software updates to make the hardware work properly.