Samsung's name for its upmarket Ativ tablet device - "Smart PC Pro" - is confusing. It is, after all, a tablet with an attachable keyboard, not a traditional PC as we know it. It is in the mould of the well-established ASUS transformer range.
But this is 2013 and a powerful Windows 8 tablet computer has the same functionality as a traditional PC and can outperform many.
That may not be the case for the Smart PC Pro's little brother/sister, the Smart PC, which looks similar but has Intel's new Atom Z2760 "Clover Trail" processor. This tablet has been criticised by a number of reviewers for being underpowered.
We can report that, in contrast, we found the Ativ Smart PC Pro with its 1.7 Gigahertz Intel Core i5 processor to be a fast Windows 8 tablet with a lovely 1080p, full HD, 11.6-inch wide-angle touchscreen. At 400 nits, it's also very bright and readable outdoors.
The Smart PC Pro is not the lightest and thinnest tablet around. Weighing 884g (without the keyboard) and 12mm thick, it is 33 per cent heavier and 28 per cent thicker than the current model iPad.
Samsung traditionally has excelled at offering useful connections and ports on its mobile devices. This is mostly the case here. There's an audio jack, a mini HDMI connector on the side, and a fully sized, fully functioning USB 3 port on the top. You can attach a regular mouse or a Flash USB stick, as you would on a notebook. Being Windows 8, you get to access the flash drive directory in no time.
The tablet also has a micro SD card slot, but that's a minus, as many notebooks and ultrabooks of similar price have a full SD slot. You won't be able to whip your full-sized SD card out of your compact camera and plug it in to download photos to the tablet.
If you dock the tablet to the keyboard, you get two extra USB 2 ports, which means in total one USB port more than the standard two found on many notebooks. Samsung ports on both the tablet and keyboard are covered with those often-hard-to-remove small plastic flaps that are becoming popular. If you have decently long fingernails, you should be careful.
Like the Asus Transformer, Samsung's Smart PC Pro comes with an attachable keyboard, but, unlike Asus, Samsung does not include a secondary battery within it. Doing so could effectively double the battery life. It's an opportunity lost.
The dyed metal keyboard, too, does look a bit cheapish, and there is no backlighting. However, keys are well spread out on the chiclet keyboard and typing on it was comfortable and accurate. The trackpad was responsive when using gestures with the Windows 8 Metro interface.
Without an added keyboard battery, the unit draws its power solely from the tablet's battery. Thankfully, the battery holds up well. I was able to stream video to it for just over six hours from another device before the battery gave out. Samsung claims five hours of battery life for playing DVDs continuously.
The Ativ Smart PC Pro has more forms of input than you can poke a stick at.
Actually, you can poke a stick at it, because one of its forms of input is Samsung's S-Pen, the electronic stylus found on its Galaxy Note tablets and smartphones. The other input forms are the keyboards and trackpad, mouse and touchscreen.
Samsung has been busy adapting its fleet of "S" apps to work in the Windows 8 environment. So you can scribble and doodle on the Smart PC Pro's S Note app just as you can on the Note. Samsung says the S Pen is a Wacom digitiser pen with 1024-level pressure sensitivity. With some skill, you should be able to create fine-line drawings and sketches with it.
The S Pen fits in the back of the tablet, so hopefully won't get lost.
Samsung's camera shooting management app S Camera, media player S Player and the S Gallery app are among offerings. While the more basic Smart PC has an eight megapixel back-facing camera, the Pro version's camera is only five megapixels. It's quaint to see the camera resolution go down as the price goes up, but Samsung obviously knows we live in a topsy-turvy world.
The tablet has a two megapixel front-facing camera, which means good resolution for video calling.
It comes with four gigabytes of RAM and our unit showed 82 GB of free space available out of 108 GB. That may not sound much, but 82 GB is sizeable in terms of what we're used to for tablet storage. The tablet rated 4.5 on the Windows Experience Index, a result dragged down by the on-board HD graphics.
This Australian model has no provision for a SIM card and this Ativ is a WiFi-only device. You'll need to buy a USB-to-Ethernet dongle to connect it to a fast-cable service.
Overall, the Ativ smart PC Pro is a fast, robust Windows 8 tablet with a lovely screen and usable, but not so pretty, metal keyboard. It is made for business use. But it does lacks the stylishness of other Samsung tablets, in particular the Galaxy Note tablet, and we have a few quibbling issues with it, as mentioned above.
At $1399 recommended with the keyboard included, it is also a pricey device. For the same cost you can buy a quality ultrabook, such as a 13-inch, 128-gigabyte drive MacBook Air with an almost equivalent 1.8 Gigahertz Core i5 processor.
So you'd buy this if you gauge you will benefit from using the Smart PC Pro in both its notebook and tablet forms. The Ativ Smart PC Pro is targeting a similar market that Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet will go after, once it comes to Australia. We see the Ativ as an upmarket alternative.
