I'm a work at home programmer, and a dad. It's been my eternal quest to seek the most portable (yet powerful) device to do my job while on the go with my family. One morning, I was talking to my wife about how awesome it would be if I could take my MacBook Air, remove the keyboard/trackpad and embed the display there -essentially an iPad that ran a real OS. Then have a docking port, so you could pop it in to get an external display/keyboard/mouse for a real "workstation" feel. I quipped that no one would make such a niche market device, as I did a Google search -and lo and behold, I saw this tablet and was amazed.
On the surface, this tablet is a marvelous assembly of technology practically something that I would dream of as a kid.
Specs nearly identical to the 2011 MacBook Air 11" 128GB of SSD space, 4GB of RAM, and a 135.09 PPI display.
Dockable to be a full workstation, and almost as light as an iPad. Lighter than any other laptop I've owned.
A real pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet. Not as accurate as my wife's Cintiq 21UX even after 3 calibration attempts, but still very decent.
Let's start with the conclusion: I returned mine. Why?
1) Use the right tool for the job
As unfortunate as it is, this is the wrong tool for a programmer. I try adhering to the academic mantra: Programming is 90% thought, and 10% typing (I realize this is only applicable for certain situations, but humor me). Physical input shouldn't be a big deal as long as you think things out first, right?
Indeed, editing code wasn't terribly difficult with the on-screen keyboard. It just took a lot longer for typing symbols; however, losing half the screen is a major detraction. Imagine you have your keyboard on the bottom of the screen -the bottom of your document is going to be covered by the keyboard. You either have to move your keyboard to the top of the screen, or dock it and permanently lose half your screen.
A large portion of a developer's working day is collaboration. I didn't realize how slow conversations would get from the lack of a physical keyboard. Enabling Pen-flicks for copy/paste/undo did help to a degree. Handwriting was amazingly accurate, but how many WPM can you actually write? Maybe someone in or fresh out of college would fare better, but for not having written much with a pen in the past decade, I noticed that I did far more WPM with a virtual keyboard. I don't get along with Swype (it doesn't mesh with programming very well), so I can't comment on if this would change your use of the device or not. In the end, a Bluetooth keyboard outperformed all other input methods by far.
This begs the question: How do you use a Bluetooth keyboard at the park bench, while balancing/tilting a tablet on your knees? It looks ridiculous!
Bottom line: If your primary use of the device requires heavy typing, and you're not part of the younger generation that can do 50+WPM on mobile devices, you will most likely regret it.
Advice: Go to your neighborhood tech store and demo any 10"+ tablet with an on-screen keyboard. Google for, and take a WPM (typing) test. Your frustration levels will be inversely proportional to your score. YMMV.
2) Do you really need it?
Let's be honest here. With a 3rd generation iPad having fairly decent specs, what's the point of paying 2.5x to get this tablet? If you need the CPU power/real OS but need a keyboard/mouse to be effective, do you really need to pay 1.5-2x of an equivalent specced laptop/ultrabook for the select few situations that you're away from a desk?
Think about what you would do with this device *without* a keyboard/mouse, as opposed to an iPad/Android tab:
Word processing/Presentations: iPad does just as decently, especially with the 4-finger swipes for multitasking.
Internet browsing: iPad does an almost better job, with the exception of lack of Flash and some JS incompatibilities. Windows 7 touch browsing has quirks with scrolling, and zoom is nowhere near as usable as iOS/Android, which means a lot of missed clicks.
Email/Chat: iPad has push notifications even when in sleep. You put the Slate to sleep, and it's out until you turn it back on -just like a normal PC. Personal preference favors the simple iOS mail client above Outlook/Thunderbird for most usage scenarios.
Games: Most Windows games are not designed for touch. StarCraft II with touch was "fun" to try. But inaccurate right clicks (cascading double-taps are the only way to pinpoint, and even that is often unreliable) pretty much kills your APM. Playing WoW on Low settings was pretty neat, although nigh-impossible to navigate without a mouse. In contrast, iOS/Android games are designed for tablets and touch and "just work" for the most part.
Artists with a need for pressure sensitive digitizer: Perhaps the best usage scenario for this device. Photoshop/Painter runs decently fast, and I can see how this would be an awesome portable sketchpad.
Note-taking: OneNote on this tablet takes the cake here, because of its superior text recognition.
Truth be told, the majority of users I know of would benefit more from a cheaper laptop/tablet instead. In my opinion, until they can come up with a better input method, I just don't know of many user demographics that would prefer this tablet over other form-factors. If you are seriously considering this product, please carefully think about your usage criteria so you don't make the same mistake as I did.
3) Hardware problems
You may or may not get a model with the commonly reported "screen lift" bug, where the adhesive holding the display glass to the chassis becomes loose, letting debris inside. Mine accumulated 5 pieces of small dust between the glass and the LCD panel in 3 days of desk-only use (not putting in bags or anything). They weren't that big, but they also don't come out. Against white backgrounds, they stand out quite a bit. Quite the eyesore, and who knows how many more would sneak in there in the coming years had I kept it?
I was relieved to see that my Samsung logo on the back of the tablet wasn't "a sticker" like another reviewer was claiming. I thought maybe I had a new hardware revision. Then one day, my wife was asking me about the unique logo on the back, with the "A" floating above the rest of the letters. Upon closer inspection, I realized I misunderstood the other reviewer the individual letters themselves are stickers. The adhesive gets loosened from the CPU heat, and the letters start turning and moving. Great design, Samsung! Couldn't you just have engraved the logo or something?
LCD panel is not the best. Definitely not IPS, and subpixel RGB rainbowing on anti-aliased text is obvious when you rotate the device to Portrait mode. Black levels are sub-par, and often looks purple from any slight angle.
Cameras are both terrible. Included utility only lets you take 320x240ish* resolution videos. If you have an iPhone or any recent Android phone, it'd easily outperform the rear-facing camera. Low-light pictures are unusably noisy. Front-facing camera is at a perpendicular angle to the tablet, so you have to lift up the tablet (held at a fair distance away), and look unnaturally "up" into the camera for the other side to have a decent/comfortable view. Otherwise, to them, it looks like you're looking down on them, which you quite literally are. Who holds tablets up to face-level like that? I guess they probably designed it for use while docked or set down with their folio case.
With only Windows 7 HP installed, and given how portable it is, it would be silly to carry around work/financial information unencrypted. TrueCrypt's System Encryption works great, but you have no Bluetooth stack at the pre-boot stage meaning you can't enter the password without a USB keyboard (Park + No USB Keyboard + Windows Update = locked out tablet). Yes, it's painful -but it's just the cost of security. One disaster I had was when I installed some Samsung driver updates, and it somehow disabled USB during the BIOS/pre-boot stage -meaning I couldn't use any keyboard until the OS booted (which is locked with the password). I had to look through the Samsung site until I found that you could go enter/navigate the BIOS with the side buttons, and re-enabled Legacy USB support, which brought back the USB keyboard. Wish there was an easy way of making Full-Disk Encryption happen with virtual/Bluetooth keyboard like in OS X, or a USB token, but that's not necessarily this product or Samsung's fault.
A hint to all owners that are complaining about slow/missed keys: The on-screen keyboard is resizeable (drag bottom right corner). When your keyboard size is small, Windows 7 will get confused where your finger landed, and quite often pretend it didn't notice the tap. Make the keyboard bigger, and not only will your accuracy increase from physical ease of use, the software will have less sensor ambiguity to deal with, leading to less headaches.
To wrap things up, this is a great tablet, no doubt. Hardware has come so far in the past decade, that it's nothing short of amazing. However, when you compare this tablet to other offerings in its price range, it's unfortunately nothing special that also may not benefit you. I used this tablet with the dock with dual (extended) displays, a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and it was indeed a very "cool" setup if I was not a programmer. But then again, if I wasn't a programmer, an iPad would have probably sufficed.
I'm pretty disappointed that my quest ended with a dismal conclusion like this, but it was certainly a good learning exercise about portability and usability. I guess I'll wait, once again, for the next generation of MacBook Air to come out. Thank you for taking the time to read my rant-filled review.
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