Samsung has unveiled a brand new top of the range laptop-come-tablet at its London event; the Samsung ATIV Q. In short, its a hybrid laptop with a screen that bests Apple’s Retina display MacBook Pro, but it’s much more than just that.
As depicted in the image above, the ATIV Q starts off as a rather slim laptop but the screen then flips up and rotates, eventually standing up against the keyboard, ready to be used like a tablet, touchscreen style. That screen is 13.3-inches in size and boasts a huge resolution of 3200 x 1800 pixels, which is a crisp 275 pixels per inch. That puts the ATIV Q ahead of Apple’s Retina Mac and the more recent Chromebook Pixel.
Like Sony’s recently revealed Vaio Duo and Asus’ Transformer Books, the ATIV Q runs two operating systems. There’s both Windows 8 and Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 to choose from, with the option to boot into either or switch between the two at will. It does not however, offer the ability to detach the screen from the keyboard and take a tablet on the go, like similar devices.
Power is provided by one of Intel’s new Haswell chips – a Core i5 to be precise, paired with 4GB of RAM and a speedy 128GB SSD for programs and files. Thanks to the Haswell chips and SSD drives you’ll be getting an impressive 9 hours of battery life from a single charge, which puts the device in Ultrabook territory. There’s also a range of connections including HDMI out, USB 3.0 and a micro SD card slot, and all in all the ATIV Q weighs in at 1.29kg and measures a very slender 13.9mm thick.
Samsung hasn’t yet confirmed when the super-sharp ATIV Q will grace our shelves, nor how much it will cost. We don’t hold out much hope of it costing under £900, though.