Stopped by Staples last night to kill some time and saw they had the Samsung ATIV and Lenovo Twist on display. Samsung ATIV is the 11.6" Win8 tablet w/ S-Pen running on Atom w/ SGX545 and the Lenovo Twist is an ultrabook running core-i5 w/ Intel HD4000.
Only got to use each product for about 10 minutes, but my first impressions are that the OS is fluid and things are easy to use. Once you get accustomed to the new UI, it's pretty easy to navigate.
The Samsung Ativ feels good to use, but the S-Pen is disappointing. The tablet comes bundled with a bunch of Samsung apps. Their note taking app is there, but it's not as fluid or responsive w/ the S-Pen as I would have hoped. The digitizer is not pin-point accurate and there was sometimes a 1 second delay between actions. Could be because it was a display model though.
The Lenovo Twist is great to use but looks to be made of rubber/plastic. The 12.5" screen is mounted on a swivel hinge which is neat, but a little bulky if you want to carry it around as a tablet. It weighs 3.86 lbs, so it's not exactly light. Having a dedicated hardware keyboard is great. The touchpad barely gets used because you can scroll by touching the screen. The only time you will need a mouse/touchpad is when you need the pointing precision. The is made of plastic and looks fairly rugged, but also looks ugly. Wouldn't want to carry it around at all.
One annoying problem with Windows 8 is that when you are using the software keyboard, it does not pop up when you click a text field. That is supremely annoying as you have to manually toggle the keyboard whenever you want it. It gets pretty annoying because the address bar is always on the top of the screen and the keyboard toggle is on the task bar. Hopefully this gets fixed via software updates.
Another minor thing is that the hard windows key on the screen always brings you back to the Live Tile interface. It's not a problem if you have a dedicated keyboard because you can use the keyboard shortcut to bring you to the desktop... but the software keyboard does not do that. A minor annoyance, and not really a big deal. Hopefully power users can abandon the tiles altogether if they want to .
After using a full fledged Windows 8 tablet, I cannot see why you would want RT at all.
Only got to use each product for about 10 minutes, but my first impressions are that the OS is fluid and things are easy to use. Once you get accustomed to the new UI, it's pretty easy to navigate.
The Samsung Ativ feels good to use, but the S-Pen is disappointing. The tablet comes bundled with a bunch of Samsung apps. Their note taking app is there, but it's not as fluid or responsive w/ the S-Pen as I would have hoped. The digitizer is not pin-point accurate and there was sometimes a 1 second delay between actions. Could be because it was a display model though.
The Lenovo Twist is great to use but looks to be made of rubber/plastic. The 12.5" screen is mounted on a swivel hinge which is neat, but a little bulky if you want to carry it around as a tablet. It weighs 3.86 lbs, so it's not exactly light. Having a dedicated hardware keyboard is great. The touchpad barely gets used because you can scroll by touching the screen. The only time you will need a mouse/touchpad is when you need the pointing precision. The is made of plastic and looks fairly rugged, but also looks ugly. Wouldn't want to carry it around at all.
One annoying problem with Windows 8 is that when you are using the software keyboard, it does not pop up when you click a text field. That is supremely annoying as you have to manually toggle the keyboard whenever you want it. It gets pretty annoying because the address bar is always on the top of the screen and the keyboard toggle is on the task bar. Hopefully this gets fixed via software updates.
Another minor thing is that the hard windows key on the screen always brings you back to the Live Tile interface. It's not a problem if you have a dedicated keyboard because you can use the keyboard shortcut to bring you to the desktop... but the software keyboard does not do that. A minor annoyance, and not really a big deal. Hopefully power users can abandon the tiles altogether if they want to .
After using a full fledged Windows 8 tablet, I cannot see why you would want RT at all.