Samsung Launches ATIV SmartPC Windows 8 Tablet

Samsung and AT&T have just announced the LTE enabled ATIV SmartPC tablet that’s manufactured by the Korean giant. This is a rather large tablet that features 11.6” screen with sporting the standard 1366 by 768 pixel HD resolution.

Considering just how big the tablet is and how 9.7” or 10.1” tablets sport FullHD resolutions or even higher, we believe that the ATIV SmartPC tablet would have been just great with a FullHD screen at least.

Samsung’s problem derives from Intel’s low performing Clover Trail and the PoverVR SGX545 iGPU. The Cover Trail SoC is doing a decent job, but it certainly doesn’t have enough processing power to handle a two-megapixel resolution or higher.

For those that don’t remember the Samsung Slate 5, this is exactly the same tablet that now, that it’s officially available, has been renamed into ATIV SmartPC.

It’s powered by Intel’s Atom Z2760 Clover Trail processor and it also comes with 2 GB or RAM and a 64 GB SSD with various connectivity options.

The nice 11.6” screen is reportedly an HP PLS panel. PLS is short for Plane-to-Line Switching.

This is a Samsung technology that allegedly offers a further improvement over the standard IPS viewing angles, a 10 percent increase in brightness and overall increased image quality.

Samsung’s angle in using PLS technology is the overall 15% reduction in production costs that PLS has over standard IPS and this makes us wonder about using IPS on other panels.

If PLS is better and cheaper, why use IPS on 90% of the company’s high-quality panels, no matter if those are phones, tablets or computer screens.

Samsung doesn’t publish the official battery rating, but rather goes for an estimated 9.4-hour video play time, a battery life rating of 13.5HRs in Mobile Mark and a 31Wh capacity.

We would have been happy to see a normal mAh rating just as Samsung’s own ATIV SmartTab has, but this is likely Intel’s request as Clover Trail can’t really compete with ARM tablets in battery life time.


The processor runs at 1.5 GHz when in high-performance mode and there are two cameras on the Samsung ATIV SmartPC with 2MP and 8MP resolution respectively.