Hasta La Gadget!

The products keep coming. The latest announcement from Samsung is a new addition to its ATIV range and it’s a hybrid in more ways than one. Similar to the ASUS Transformer Book Trio, announced earlier this month at Computex, Samsung just introduced its own dual-OS portable. It’s called the ATIV Q, and it combines Android 4.2 and Windows 8. Under the hood, the device is powered by a Haswell-series Intel Core i5 processor and manages to fit a 13.3-inch, 3,200 x 1,800 touchscreen into a 1.29kg package that measures just 13.9mm thick. Other notable specs include an S Pen with 1,024 degrees of sensitivity. There’s space for the stylus to be stored in the bottom corner of the device. Hardware considerations have also been folded into the design, with the processor housed inside the ATIV Q’s hinge. Samsung says that this ensures that heat dissipates from the back of the device.

A software highlight from this particular Windows 8-Android team-up is the ability to share files (photos, documents… seemingly anything that can be opened with programs on the other OS) and share folders across the operating system divide. We can certainly see the usefulness in this approach — sharing images to your favorite Android social app and generally unifying how you use the hybrid, regardless of OS. The ATIV Q will launch globally in Q3, and we’ve been told “in time for the back-to-school season”, which sounds like sooner rather than later. We’ve managed to spend a bit of time with the new multi-talented slider: check out some first impressions after the break.

Update: We just added some video.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Samsung, Google

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Here at Samsung’s “Premiere” event in London, the company is showing off a slew of new devices, both Galaxy branded and ATIV branded. One of these new devices to be announced today is the ATIV Tab 3, which is what Samsung is claiming to be the “world’s thinnest Windows 8 tablet.” From what we’re seeing,

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Parts of Taos are centuries old, and now a major wireless and Internet outage has temporarily taken life in the town back in time.

(Credit: Taos.org/Lenny Foster)

Call me inverse Marty McFly, for today I’m writing from the faraway world of the 1980s.

Or at least that’s the the era that comes to mind in my home base of Taos, N.M., since about 7:30 Wednesday evening, when one of CenturyLink’s fiber-optic lines east of town was severed, knocking out virtually all cell phone service and much of the Internet access in town.

Perhaps you’ve thought about what it would be like to go back to another technological age before ubiquitous smartphones and 4G. Maybe your older relatives long for just such a digital apocalypse. Or maybe, like me, you just watch too many end-of-the-world movies and TV shows. But — whatever the reason — perhaps you’ve wondered how you would handle such a low-tech scenario. If you’re one of the many who’ve endured big storms like Katrina or Sandy, you already know the answer.

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Now that video on Instagram just got real, a connected pro camera with direct access to Android apps makes a fair bit of sense. Enter the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy NX.

Samsung continues to push its Galaxy brand into new devices’ types and categories, a strategy aimed at extending the success it’s had with the brand in smartphones. Today the Korean giant has added the Galaxy badge to its high end camera range, with the launch of this digital mirrorless interchangeable lens camera (MILC): its first interchangeable lens camera to run Android.

Samsung’s other high end cameras have been badged NX but this is the first time it’s used the Galaxy brand on its pro range. It’s not, however, the first time it’s pushed the Galaxy brand into camera tech territory — having recently extended the Galaxy S4 range with a hybrid smartphone point-and-shoot camera with a 10x optical zoom on the back. That device, the Galaxy S4 Zoom, remains a mid-range affair. It’s certainly not targeting the professional photographer market, as the Galaxy NX presumably is. Samsung also previously launched another mid-range camera running Android, called the Galaxy Camera — making extending the brand to its pro MILC range a natural next step.

The Galaxy NX runs Android 4.2.2 skinned with a version of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI tweaked to make sense for the camera format. This means the UI defaults to the camera app view. Swiping left from there brings up a familiar Samsung Android home screen where users can get at all the usual Android stuff including Google Play, the web browser, plus apps — like Instagram, say. And that’s the obvious use-case for a bit of kit like this: being able to post near-SLR quality photos direct to apps like Instagram or share on social media, without even having to pull the photos off the camera first. The Galaxy NX has both 4G/LTE and Wi-Fi built in. It is Samsung’s first interchangeable lens camera to include LTE, in fact.

The version of Android on the Galaxy NX does not include a phone dialer but that’s the only other major software difference when compared to a typical Samsung smartphone. The point here is clearly for Samsung to leverage the familiarity of its TouchWiz environment to try to bolster the appeal of its high end camera kit.

Who might the Galaxy NX appeal to? Perhaps someone  hankering for a better camera but not necessarily yet especially well versed in how to use more pro photography equipment. The external look and feel of the Galaxy NX bears that theory out, being especially plain looking — almost devoid of markings. It’s also terribly lightweight for such a large bit of kit, adding another convenience string to its bow.

The Galaxy NX has a 20.3MP APS-C CMOS Image sensor that’s 24mm in size. It’s powered by Samsung’s DRIMe IV processor, which it says is 4x faster than its previous processor. The device supports up to 25,600 ISO, and it’s the same family of interchangeable lens as Samsung’s prior MILCs.

Click to view slideshow.

At its event in London, Samsung announced two new to add to its lineup: The Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus and the Samsung Ativ Book 9 Lite.

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