Samsung Reveals Additional Details on Series 5 and 7 Slates and Ultrabooks

Along with their ATIV, Smartphone, and Series 9 coverage and their Galaxy Note II, Samsung has released additional details for several upcoming Windows 8 Ultrabooks and Slates. The Series 5 and Series 7 slates (ATIV PCs) are obviously the biggest attention grabbers, as they’re using Intel CPUs to power Windows 8 tablets. There’s some conflicting information on branding, with the slates alternately being called ATIV, but we have the full specs and MSRP now so we thought we’d revisit the topic. Let’s start with the specs table.

The Series 5 ATIV PC uses an Atom Z2760 processor/SoC codenamed Clover Trail, which we’ve discussed previously. The short summary is that it’s Cedar Trail but for tablets rather than netbooks/nettops. It appears to be clocked at 1.8GHz with a higher clocked PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU. The interesting aspect of such a tablet is that, unlike ARM products running Windows RT, Atom chips are able to run the full backlog of existing x86 software along with all the Metro/Modern/Windows 8 applications. Pricing is obviously quite a bit higher than what you’ll currently pay for an Android tablet (though it’s slightly less than the new 64GB iPad), but the software side of the equation might be enough to get some people to pony up and you can also buy the optional keyboard dock for additional flexibility—note that the keyboard does not include any extra battery capacity.

The Series 7 ATIV PC is priced significantly higher, but it’s essentially a full-blown Ultrabook with the ability to undock the display and use it as a tablet. It comes with a 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM, and a 1080p display, putting it in the same performance category as higher end Ultrabooks. It also comes standard with the keyboard dock, though again the keyboard doesn’t add any additional battery life. We’re obviously going to see a lot more interesting devices like this in the near term, and how successful they end up being will determine whether we see more companies go the hybrid route. It’s certainly an innovative idea, but selling a $1200 hybrid device compared to the $200 to $600 typical tablets might be asking too much—you could buy a $400 tablet and an $800 laptop and end up with two devices that might work better individually instead of a single do-everything device, though there’s certainly a convenience factor in being able to use a single device for both functions.

Moving on from their ATIV/Slate offerings, Samsung also has a couple new Series 5 Ultrabooks coming out with multitouch screens. The specs are essentially identical with the exception of the CPU; the $799 model will use an i3-3217U (1.8GHz, no Turbo) while the $849 model goes with an i5-3317U (1.7GHz with Turbo up to 2.6GHz). The storage solutions use ExpressCache, similar to the Series 7 Chronos laptop we reviewed, and we haven’t found it to be particularly great in our previous experience; we’d much rather ditch the caching and just get a 128GB SSD as the baseline instead, but obviously there’s a cost factor that Samsung needs to deal with. We don’t have any details on the type of screens used other than the resolution and multitouch capabilities, but given they’re Series 5 we wouldn’t expect high-end LCD panels—those are usually reserved for Series 7 and 9 products. Certainly Microsoft is putting a lot of emphasis on touchscreen interfaces with Windows 8, and for tablets, slates, and smartphones that’s the wave of the future. How that will translate over to laptops and desktop is a different question, but we should have plenty of opportunities to try it out in the near future.