Clover Trail CPU is based on Atom 1.8 GHz,
dual-core with 2 GB RAM. The similar specifications would be found on almost
all tablets or hybrid laptops which are operating Windows 8. So, the
performance is also the same? You’d think so, but as we discovered in other
Tegra 3 tablets that we checked at the beginning of the year, many things can
be different from brands to brands, even from devices to devices. Set aside all
problems about the Atom’s slowness (some are still rumors anyway), this is a
faulty tablet. Some applications broke down during our test, even Internet Explorer
and the stock camera program. Similarly, some crashing applications forced us
to execute hard reset. Especially, the camera application was frozen many times
when we tried to switch to the video mode.
Battery
charger
Just to remind you, we did not face any
similar problem on any other Windows 8 devices that we tested. The Metro
version of IE was also frozen more than 1 time, and sometimes the screen could
not react when we attempted to swipe in from a side to switch to open
applications. At the meantime, the accelerometer was usually slow to catch up
with the directional change. Worst of all, we found out these problem on both
of different tested units. A representative of Samsung told us that the company
had nothing to say about the future updated firmware, although AT&T had
confirmed that there were indeed some software improvements.
On the desktop aspect, we recognized that
applications like IE 10 and Windows Media Player are usually so slow in
starting-up that we wondered whether the tablet was aware of the fact that we
had double-clicked these shortcuts right at the beginning. This signals bad
omens if you intend to use it as a substitution for computers sometimes.
A little more on desktop side, you could
also forget about playing games: although on the technical side, Smart PC can
run many legacy x86 games, the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator just
get the score of 374 in 3DMark06 while its reading writing speed, in the ATTO
disk test, just peaked at 82 MB/s and 36 MB/s. We’ll venture to say we did not
expect more from other Atom tablets; maybe the slow performance is the biggest
crime here. However, when checking the list of possible using cases for this
tablet, it was worrying that we had to eliminate the tablet features and
desktop productivity from the list. If Smart PC provides unreliable performance
in the tablet mode and is too slow to complete its tasks in the desktop mode,
why could you spend $700 for such device?
According to Samsung, the LTE version of
the tablet will last 7 hours on a charge. It sounds good to us. With the
on-wireless and off-LTE, the 4080 mAh battery last 7 hours and 4 minutes for
video playing, with the fixed screen brightness at 65%. When we connected with
LTE and turned the wireless radio on, we had 6 hours and 43 minutes, and
because this was x8 processor, not an ARM chip, we would never expect it to
last as long as iPad or Neus 10 for example. The problem is when this is such a
small device and AT&T does not sell the keyboard and you still pay $700 on
contract, you have to wonder whether it should have a PC-level chip inside.
The stock LTE radio performs as good as
advertised. With a full signal, we recorded the highest downloading speed of
27.5 Mbps and the maximum uploading speed is 14.5 Mbps, although the
performance is around 10Mbps on average (for both download and upload). When
checking around New York City and San Francisco, we also noted that uploading
speed sometimes is higher than downloading speed, especially in cases that we
just have the average values.
Software
We often complained the carriers for
uploading their devices with bloatware, so it is good to see the Smart PC
version of AT&T containing little pre-installed software. All that we have
are a Live Tile displaying the use of data and a Kindle reader, Slacker Radio,
Microsoft Office, Plant vs Zombies and Jamie Oliver’s Recipes. Samsung also
packed some special software, including S Player for video games, “Photo
editor” and of course, the second camera applications that we have mentioned.
There
are no S Pen applications installed on the device.
Interestingly, the applications are not
included on the device. When Samsung first gave us a demo version of Smart PC,
the tablet had pen support, and accompanied by many S Pen applications of
Samsung. In fact, if you purchase the wireless model from Samsung’s website,
you will see that the company is advertising these features, even including S
Pen in boxes. However, if choosing LTE version, you will see that Samsung have
erased everything that can prove this used to be a pen-enabled tablet. There
are no S Pen applications installed on the device. You cannot download them
from the production support website. There is also no pen in the box; there
hardware no longer responds to the pen input, so although you provide your own
pen, it would still don’t work. To be fair, when we described S Pen
applications of Samsung were more than a compulsory feature, but even so, we
cannot completely dedicate to a company that removed features from their device
in order to earn the long-term profitability.
Windows
8 interface
When we just saw the device for the first
time, Samsung just showed us some optional applications designed for using
Windows 8 easier. They comprise of Easy Settings, a desktop application that can
manage wireless network and optional displays… without activating Charms Bar.
There was also S Launcher, a desktop utility designed for substituting the old
Start Menu, and AllShare Play, the application that allows you to stream media
files to DLNA-compatible devices, such as the television. They are not
installed on the device; you have to download them from the support website of
Samsung. The problem is that if you go to the product page for Smart PC version
of AT&T, you will not be able to find any of these applications. In order
to find Easy Settings, we have to go to the product page for the wireless-only
version of the tablet, which the name of “ATIV Smart PC 500T” is not the most
obvious name in the world. Even then, we could not find the download link for S
Launcher, just Easy Settings. Meanwhile, AllShare came as a part of a
hard-to-categorize file called “Software package”. Here, you should also know
where to look up if you wanted to find out anything.
