Hector, a guest poster and CloverTrail Windows 8 tablet owner has another post for us today. He’s been looking at navigation applications in Windows 8 on his Samsung ATIV SmartPC 500T. Don’t forget to subscribe to Hectors YouTube channel here. Follow him on Twitter here and check out his blog here. Thanks Hector!

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Reviewed by Osiris
Many thanks to Osiris for the review which was sent to us a few days ago. Osiris is a Samsung ATIC SmartPC owner and has submitted this review as a guest post.

For the last decade I have had an on-going, on and off again, love-hate relationship with Windows based tablets. Some of these tablets have included and spanned hefty Windows XP tablets, tiny Vista based tablets right through to modern more effective Windows 7 tablets. Despite these varieties and many more shapes and sizes, typically over this time the same limits have persistently dogged these tablets; poor battery life, heavy weight, poor performance and high niche pricing. In many instances the latter two were forgivable; however trying to use a tablet for day to day, study or business purposes with the first two deficiencies makes it an uphill – and often – inconvenient battle. With the advent of Windows 8 another era of hope and optimism dawns over the Windows tablet landscape. Promises of light devices providing all day battery, choices of performance at all levels and a true windows experience in a mobile platform abound. I am familiar with these promises from almost every generation of Windows tablets since their inception, the question is could this year finally be the year it all comes true? The short answer is Yes…but we are still in an era of compromise, this goes for all tablets.Keep that in mind as I will speak more about that at the end although without further delay let’s get into looking at our first Atom clover trail based Windows 8 tablet, the Samsung Smart PC.

This is the feature that we’ve been waiting for low power states in Windows that match what you might see on a smartphone. Always on! Personally I  think it’s a feature that Intel haven’t promoted well enough, possibly because it makes Ultrabooks look a little old fashioned.

The new low power states have been available in hardware since Moorestown chipsets were available and you can experience them in action in Android tablets and smartphones running on Intel but in the world of Windows PCs, only the CloverTrail platform /Windows 8 offers this new level of of idle efficiency. It means you’ll get a big improvement in battery life and the possibility of always-on action.

In the last 24hrs I’ve had feedback from a user in Germany that proves it’s working.

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Starting from 9th November in the US you’ll be able to buy a Windows 8 PC, a full Windows 8 PC, that weighs just 1.27lb / 658gm lighter than the good old handheld ultra mobile PC favorite, the Viliv X70EM and lighter than any full-size iPad.  The Acer Iconia W510, part of the Acer Iconia W5 Series, runs a dual-core 1.5Ghz Clover Trail CPU with turbo boost to 1.8Ghz, a newer GPU, 32BG of solid-state storage, an optional keyboard dock, a claimed 9hrs of battery life and a 1366×768 IPS multitouch capacitive touchscreen. The Viliv X70EX started at about $600/ The Acer Iconia W510 starts at $499. In Europe you’ll get the dock thrown in for a total of 500 Euro.

Let’s take a closer look at the W510 and think about what it says about the state of ultra mobile PCs in 2012

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Just how long have we been waiting for a low-power productive computing platform and an operation system built to go with it? Atom has been around (largely unchanged in it’s CPU architecture) for many years but we’ve been through Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 before the OS finally matured to support touch, pen and mouse computing. UMPC’s won’t  be coming soon but if the convertible Windows 8 devices do well, there’s a chance that the screen-sizes will drop.

Last week at IDF I took a look at a few of the convertibles and spent a lot of time learning about the platform and analyzing what could be possible.

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I’ve read a lot of negative press about the Windows 8 user experience recently which seems to focus on a ‘problem’ created by having two user interfaces that will confuse users. I just don’t see that issue. Sure, there will be some new things to learn, every new system has a learning curve, but I don’t see huge barriers in Windows 8.

Today I’m working on a Windows 8 Tablet. I’m working, which means I’ve got a keyboard, a mouse and a large screen in front of me.

Windows booted quickly on this Atom-based tablet PC (ExoPC) and because I just wanted to do some Chrome work and write this post I went straight to the desktop by clicking ‘Desktop.’ It works like any laptop or desktop.

I’ve been in ‘desktop’ all the time I’ve had my bum on my seat (apart from taking a few images) and as you would expect, Metro is not causing me any problems. I can switch to it very easily by dragging the mouse to the top left, bottom left corner or pressing the Windows key, Alt-Tab and other methods that didn’t take me too long to work out. If you want to use Windows 8 like you used Windows 7 there’s no issue.

If you end up in Metro through inquisitiveness or accident you can either hit the ESC or Windows key to toggle to the last application, Alt-Tab to see a list of running programs, use the programs list accessed from pointing to the top-left corner of the screen or I can hit that big icon in front of me that says ‘Desktop.’

On my keyboard I even have an Alt-Tab button that looks like a set of Windows, a media button that starts Media Player (in the Desktop) or I can even just start typing “desktop inch and I’ll be shown the shortcut to hit. If in doubt, press the Windows key and start typing. Word, Desktop, Mail, Photo, Music, Help. You can even type the name of a file or a setting. They all work! If you don’t have a keyboard, swipe from right and press the search button.

How simple do people actually need this to be to be convinced that if you want the Desktop it’s there and if you want to do stuff when you don’t have a keyboard, there’s a new interface that can really help. You can get going on day 1, and start discovering after you’ve read your email!

Windows 8 is not a Fischer Price toy or a gaming console, it’s a rich operating system that can help you get things done like few other operating systems can, either with keyboard and mouse or with a finger. Some people may take a few minutes to understand this idea but isn’t that just normal, and worth the time, for a rich operating system?

As I tool a look at the MSI booth at CeBIT yesterday I couldn’t stop myself from getting a little hands-on with the WindPad 110W. AMD Fusion-based and equiped with a nice optical mouse pointer and full SD card slot it’s a tablet design that could rally benefit from the next-gen OS and platforms.

The MSI rep nods and smiles and I talk about 1366×768 and Windows 8, as we discuss the reason for having a mouse pointer in a 1KG tablet and how Windows 8 + Clover Trail W with a fast SSD could really bring usable low-cost productive tablets to end-users.

MSI won’t say anything about new products but they’re clearly thinking about this. In tact, I got the impression that they’re more interested in Windows tablets than in Ultrabooks which they tell me are not going to be broguth to the market until they have taken a longer term look at the Ultrabook market.

It’s a blast from 2011 to play with the WindPad again but I think that we’re going to see more of this later this year. Tablets, convertibles and, my favorite, the detachable Atom-powered Win8/Android screen and Intel Core-driven keyboard base station, all in under 1.5KG!

I’m in Hannover, Germany, for CeBit and as I start this article, Sascha Pallenberg of Netbooknews.com is sitting on the other side of our ‘blog apartment’ watching the Windows 8 consumer preview keynote from Mobile World Congress last week. A few evenings ago I was testing Windows 8 on an Atom-based tablet and while all that has been happening I’ve been thinking about Cover Trail W,  the ultra-mobile platform that Intel have built to run Windows 8.  In dual-core 1.8Ghz build with an SSD and 2GB of RAM I think we’ll have a winner on our hands when it comes to a platform. We can only hope that manufacturers see the potential for new form factors with this platform and operating system combo.

While the ARM-based platforms are approaching the same processing power band as we see on the high-end Atom platforms (Qualcomm’s Snapdragon is looking particularly impressive in terms of dual-core performance) they won’t contain the full goodness of Windows from day one. By that I mean you won’t be able to pick up an ARM-based Windows 8 platform and be able to download and install your favorite desktop apps. Clover Trail “W, on the other hand, is a full X86 PC platform and will act like an Ultrabook or a desktop PC and I believe that Windows 8 will be able to pull some impressive low-power usage figures out of the platform. From what I’ve seen in my testing and listening between the lines to what Intel has to say about Windows 8, it will definitely be ‘Clover Trail aware.’

In my testing of Windows 8 Beta this week I was getting those old ultra mobile PC and modular computing feelings back again. Windows 8 is likely to be the first usable ‘smartbook’ operating system on the market. Android always looks great in demos on the ASUS Transformer Prime but there’s a long road ahead in terms of filling the gaps for productivity workers. There’s a Prime sitting on the desk to the right of me now but this article is being written on a Samsung NP350 which is faster, cheaper, and more productive.

I’ll be looking for more information on Windows 8 and Clover Trail W this week. We’ve seen a demo device or two behind glass but maybe now that the public preview is available, manufacturers won’t be so shy with the Windows 8 letting us have hands-on.

Is there any big Windows 8 questions that you think need answering?