Would you pay $650 for a Wintel tablet?
That's the price Samsung will charge for its upcoming Windows 8-based
Series 5 Slate powered by Intel's newly unveiled Atom Z2760 chip.
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Samsung and several other Intel and Microsoft
partners were on hand at an Intel-hosted event at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art on Thursday to showcase upcoming Windows 8 tablets
and hybrid laptops that use Intel's dual-core, 1.8GHz System-on-a-Chip
(SoC) formerly code named Clover Trail. The Atom Z2760 (pictured) will
be released on Oct. 26 alongside Microsoft's next-generation,
touch-optimized operating system, with hardware manufacturers like
Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and others coming out with tablets and
hybrid tablet-laptops built around the x86 SoC and running Windows 8.
Before getting started, Intel Mobile and
Communications Group executive Erik Reid tried to clear up a bit of a
PR mess over reported comments made by CEO Paul Otellini in Asia earlier
in the week.
"We could not be more excited about
Windows 8 and what it brings to the market ... and that's the message
Paul delivered to the employees this week," Reid said, referring to and
dismissing reports that Otellini described Windows 8 as not being ready
for release.
Samsung was the only Wintel partner at the SFMOMA showcase to name a price for
its upcoming product. The Series 5 Slate will sell for $649 as a tablet
and for $749 with its dockable keyboard attached, the South Korean tech
giant said.
Other products on display included
hybrid laptops with detachable tablets like the Acer Iconia W510, Asus
Vivo Tab, Dell Latitude 10, and HP Envy x2, all due out in the Windows 8
release timeframe, as well as a standalone tablet Lenovo called the
ThinkPad 2 that could also be ready by Oct. 26 and another standalone
from ZTE called the V98 that won't be made available until January.
One notable party missing from the event
was Microsoft itself, which has its own Intel-based version of its
self-produced, Windows 8-based Surface tablet on tap as well. Fujitsu
and LG Electronics are also readying Windows 8 tablets and hybrids
running on Atom chips, according to Intel.
Other than Samsung's, Lenovo's, and
ZTE's offerings, these Clover Trail laptop-tablet hybrids are all being
sold as a package deal, so the $749 Samsung will charge for both its
tablet and keyboard set-up might be the benchmark for prices we can
expect for the other manufacturer's devices.
For consumers, the new Wintel hybrids
from Acer, Asus, HP, and Samsung are probably the best bets for a
holiday purchase. Dell's Latitude 10 and Lenovo's ThinkPad 2 are being
targeted at the enterprise, according to those companies.
All of the tablets and detachable
tablets showcased at SFMOMA were in the 10-inch to 11-inch range,
weighed in at as little as 1.5 pounds, and were in the 9-millimeter
range for thinness. Some thicker Windows 8 tablets sporting more
powerful and more power hungry Intel Core chips were on display at the
event but ultimately this was a day for Clover Trail.
The Atom Z2760 is a 32-nanometer chip
with hyperthreading that affords four-way processing on its two CPU
cores, plus a built-in graphics engine that Intel pitched as delivering
better graphics and video performance than ever before. You'll get more
than 10 hours of battery life on a system packing the Clover Trail SoC,
according to Intel, plus better than three weeks of connected standby.
Because it's built on the x86
architecture, the Atom Z2760 is basically tailor-made for Windows, Reid
said. He and a colleague demonstrated a Clover Trail slate running such
core Microsoft productivity apps as Word and Excel without a hitch, as
well as showing a brief snippet of a shoot-em-up video game and a deejay
application.
"Intel has made a lot of progress on
their tablet SoC. If you look back just a year ago, Windows-based Intel
tablets were high performance, but also were thick, heavy, had a fan,
and got around four hours of battery life," said Patrick Moorhead,
principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategies.
"With the Atom Z2760, Intel now has
tablets as thin as 9mm, light, fanless, and with all day battery life.
That's a huge change and was driven as much by hardware design as it was
software integration."
Intel spent a lot of time talking up
voice recognition and gesture-based interfaces for future-generation
ultrabooks, tablets, and hybrids at the recent Intel Developer Forum.
None of that technology will be in the first wave of Wintel tablets and
hybrids, it appears, but what you will be getting in systems like the HP
Envy x2 and the Samsung Series 5 is a device that functions like both a
standard Windows laptop PC and a pretty nifty tablet to boot.
Will that make a dent in the holiday
market with popular products already out there like the Android-based
Nexus 7 $249.00 at B&H Photo-Video from Google and Asus, the new
Nook Tablet from Barnes & Noble, and the rumored iPad Mini from
Apple—not to mention Microsoft's own Surface and tablets running the
ARM-optimized Windows RT version of Windows 8?
Moorhead said it looks like Intel's play
in the consumer tablet space may take a bit longer to gain steam than
the traction it stands to get in the enterprise with the release of
Windows 8.
"Tablets from HP and Dell will initially
play very well in the enterprise space, a market which Apple is trying
hard to penetrate. Intel-based tablets provide a much stronger value
proposition than an iPad to enterprise IT, in that to the enterprise,
they 'look' like a Windows PC. They're deployed, managed, and have the
security that IT is already familiar with," the analyst said.
"As for the consumer space, while
nothing keeps Intel from attacking that now, it looks like Microsoft and
its ARM partners Nvidia and Qualcomm are more focused there right now."
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