The IFA 2011 news keeps coming. Today we have a quick hands-on video from Roland for the 11.6″ Samsung Series 7 Slate running Windows 7. It has some pretty beefy specs with an Intel Core i5 2467 processor running at 1.6 GHz, yet the slate is still fairly thin, with an impressive average battery life of 7 hours. It has an active digitizer screen with a nice resolution of 1366 x 768. Despite having a thin profile, the Samsung Series 7 slate still has several useful ports: 1 full-sized USB, micro-HDMI, and finally, separate SD and micro-SD slots. Interestingly, there is a hardware button at the bottom of the screen, which I believe is configurable. The demo unit that Roland had was configured to bring up the desktop, but in another quick look video we featured, the button was configured to open a touch-friendly launcher app that Samsung added. There are stereo speakers at the bottom, and two cameras — 2MP on the front, 5MP on the back. With the stylus-optimized apps in Windows 7, it would be useful for editing and annotating photos taken with the cameras. Great for “saving” notes off of a whiteboard, for example.
For people who would love a tablet computer, but still need to use Windows instead of a mobile OS like Android or iOS, the Samsung Series 7 looks like a very good choice. The slate bundled with its dock and Bluetooth keyboard would be a very portable, yet fully-functional business set up, or it would also be great for students. The Series 7 model that Roland previewed also comes with 3G and GPS functionality, and has a suggested price of $1199 USD, including the dock and keyboard, which is actually a great price for everything you get.
