Samsung has been busy at the IFA 2012 trade show in Berlin this week. Among other announcements, it entered the Windows 8 tablet market with an unexpected twist, showing off Series 5 and Series 7 Slates that are outfitted with the company’s S Pen stylus as well as a hinged keyboard dock.
In addition to the Slates there’s a new Windows 8 smartphone and another Galaxy Note. The Samsung mobile device onslaught comes a few weeks before Apple is expected to introduce a new iPhone and, perhaps weeks later, a smaller iPad and maybe even a TV.
The Samsng Slates feature 11.6-inch displays with resolutions of 1366 by 768 and 1920 by 1080, respectively, and keyboard docks that attach via a "mechanical hinge," that connects so securely "users can pick up the device with one hand without fear of the pieces separating," Samsung executives said in an Aug. 29 statement.
The S Pen is embedded in a slot in the Slates and, like Samsung’s newer Notes, features handwriting-to-text conversion and 1,024 levels of sensitivity — the harder a user pushes down when writing, the darker and deeper the mark.
The Series 5 Slate with the keyboard dock, is priced at $749, without it, $649. The Series 7 is priced at $1,199.
Also among its news was the introduction of a slightly larger Note device, the Galaxy Note II, which features a 5.5-inch display and still falls under the smartphone category, as far as Samsung is concerned. Play Infinite leaked the details yesterday.
A greater surprise is an ATIV S smartphone. (ATIV, you may be interested or depressed to learn, is Vita or "life," in Latin spelled backward.) Microsoft, on its Windows Phone Blog, hailed the first of many Windows 8 phones to come, calling the smartphone "equal parts powerhouse and head turner."
The ATIV S is 8.7mm thin, features a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED (active-matrix organic LED) display covered in Gorilla Glass, runs a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, has a 1GB of RAM on board, an 8MP camera on the back and a 1.9MP camera up-front. It’ll come with the option of 16GB or 32GB, and both will have microSD slots and 2,300mAh batteries.
No word yet on which carriers will offer it or how it will be priced.
To read the original eWeek article, click here: Samsung Intros Smartphone, Slate-Style Tablets, Galaxy Note II
