Samsung ATIV Smart PC: Revisiting Clover Trail Convertibles

Concluding on Clover Trail for Windows

I used the ATIV Smart PC as my main system on the CES show floor. It worked out relatively well, though part of that was due to the fact that I didn’t actually spend much time using it there. My CES scheduling this year ended up in back-to-back-to-back meetings for a large portion of my three days there. Much of my writing ended up being done back in the hotel room where I had my trusty Samsung Series 7 Chronos to rely on. But honestly, the ATIV was pretty solid. I had relatively modest expectations for it on the way in—“last all day, give me a solid writing tool, and run Lightroom so I can publish decent posts on the go.” That’s what I said I wanted out of it in the CES gear article I posted in Pipeline the day I left, and the ATIV did all I asked of it with nary a complaint or hiccup in the process.

As I type this, my roommate is sitting behind me playing StarCraft II on the ATIV Smart PC, albeit rather slowly. And honestly, that’s the story for me with Clover Trail. You really get the best of both worlds with regards to PC application compatibility and battery life. Performance, at times, can be a bit pokey, particularly on the GPU side of things. But Clover Trail really brings all day computing to the world of x86 tablet PCs. It isn’t the fastest or most interesting SoC in the world. But in a mobile companion, if having 10 hours of battery life matters, you cannot beat the Clover Trail/Windows 8 combination as a tablet platform. It’s just so much more versatile than iOS or Android in terms of replacing a small notebook, and when you factor in the battery life parity that we see in Clover Trail, that’s a legitimately valuable proposition.

Just based on pricing, it becomes quickly evident that the Atom-based tablets offering the best value right now are the ATIV Smart PC and ASUS’ VivoTab Smart. You can get either in 64GB form in the $500-550 range, making them cheaper than most Windows RT devices offering equal amounts of storage space (though it’s worth mentioning that you can get a VivoTab RT for less than $400 pretty readily). As a value proposition, you have to think about it—would you rather pay $499 for a 16GB iPad, a 32GB Nexus 10, or a full fledged Windows Tablet PC with ~35GB of unused storage space? Put in terms like that, it’s pretty awesome.

The ATIV Smart PC is a decent tablet, and taken on its own it’s a good device. But there are some really key missteps that were made with the hardware—design, build quality, and display. Given the cost and overall usability of the device, it’s possible to overlook these flaws, but the comparison to the VivoTab Smart is where the ATIV Smart PC starts to fall down. The ASUS has a nicer 10.1” form factor with a better display, along with better styling and build quality. The ATIV does have one trump card—the active digitizer. Other than that, the 10.1” VivoTab Smart is just a better piece of hardware, more elegant and nicer to use. Honestly, unless you really want the Wacom digitizer, you’re better off going the direction of the ASUS.