Samsung XE500T1C-A01US Pro Reviews

There’s no question that Window 8 and the Atom Z2760 make for a good team in the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T. At this price range, you’re looking for more power and more screen real estate than you’re going to find in a tablet that’s just designed for reading books or watching a movie on the plane. In other words, the ATIV 500T is more than just a "media consumption" device. The 500T is ready for work and play, with a large, bright, and very responsive screen and enough power to handle common desktop applications effortlessly. We also like the 500T as an entertainment tablet. Sure, the 11.6-inch screen adds enough real estate to the tablet to make it less wieldy than your average 7-inch tablet, but because the 500T is so thin and light, it’s still manageable. That said, unless you’re always on the go, we would invest in that optional dock (sorry, Samsung didn't have one for our evaluation). When you’re watching video on the 500T, you’ll probably want to prop it up on something, rather than hold it the whole time. And of course typing on a full keyboard beats banging on glass for most folks, any day of the week. Our quibble with the speaker volume aside, the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T really does justice to Windows 8 and offers a competitive solution to Microsoft's Surface Pro. Its screen is vibrant and a joy to watch video on, and we could also see it as an asset in an office setting or for light duty road work, when you really need to get more traditional computing done.

Using the Samsung ATIV Smart PC leaves me with mixed feelings. The touch experience is excellent, but the overall size seems to be just a bit too large for comfortable use as a tablet. The ATIV performs well as a tablet, however, and the touchscreen is responsive and gorgeous. But the overall awkwardness because of the size makes it less than optimal. As a laptop, it’s well-suited for light duty use: checking email, browsing the web, doing a little word processing. However, you’d never mistake it for a full performance laptop. The 2GB of memory is limiting, and the system can get sluggish if you fire up several large desktop applications. In the end, the Samsung ATIV Smart PC suffers from an inability to make up its mind what it should be. The size makes it awkward as a tablet and the performance means it’s too sluggish to be a full performance laptop. That lack of a strong identity may limit its appeal to users in either the tablet or lightweight laptop camp.