Samsung Windows 8 Developers PC Revealed, 5,000 Tablets Given to Build Attendees

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Just as reported last week, the star of this year’s Microsoft Build developer conference in Anaheim, California is the upcoming desktop OS of the company, Windows 8. And, also just as expected, Microsoft introduced the first Window 8 tablet at Build, a Samsung-made machine, which Redmond seems to refer to as a PC.

Since the introduction of the iPad people debated whether the tablet should be included in the PC business or in the mobile business, and it looks like Microsoft believes that tablets are PCs, even if that means admitting the iPad has been chewing away some PC market share from Microsoft in favor of Apple in the process.

The Samsung tablet PC unveiled today doesn’t have a specific name, but at least 5,000 units will be given to developers and other Build attendees. In other words don’t be surprised to see one of these babies hit eBay or Craigslist in the near future.

The new Samsung tablets are going to offer you an 11.6-inch Samsung Super PLS display with a 1,366 x 768 resolution, a 64GB SSD, 4GB of RAM, a second-gen Intel Core i5 processor, an actual fan inside the device and a dock with USB, HDMI and Ethernet ports. If you ask me this tablet looks like a laptop that lost its physical keyboard and traded a regular display for a touch-friendly one. As you expect there are no pricing details and launch dates available for this Windows tablet PC yet, and I wouldn’t hold my breath to seeing Samsung announce such details yet as Windows 8 is only going to be launched at some point in 2012.

The 5,000 Samsung Windows 8 tablets will also be fitted with access to a year of 3G service from AT&T, of up to 2GB of traffic per month, just in case you were wondering about data connectivity on the go.

I wouldn’t normally be impressed with a Windows-based tablet, as long as it would run a pre-Windows 8 version, but it looks like Microsoft is about to reinvent its tablets as well. From what I’ve seen so far from the distance, Microsoft is really interested in creating a new, original, tablet environment, based partly on Windows 7, for the underlying OS and on Windows Phone 7 for the actual Metro-based interface.

With Windows 8 running on it, the tablet certainly looks better than its predecessors, but at the same time it’s still an early build that will not offer users a real tablet experience. The interface seems to be pretty responsive (see the video below) and Microsoft seems interested in offering users plenty of neat tricks to make their tablet experience even more interesting. There’s support for various gestures, a totally new lock screen, and various apps can be run on the device at the same time in their own window. Search and sharing has been also redesigned and linked to content available in various apps, and the “old” desktop is still present in case the actual, non-tablet part of the OS, is needed for certain chores.

But I also see a problem here, the Windows 8 tablet is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde device. On one hand it offers a tablet-friendly interface, similar to WP7 therefore familiar to a certain set of customers, but at the same time the Windows-like OS is still there, in the background, and users may have a tough time switching back and forth from a tablet layout to a desktop layout since one or the other will be required for certain specific actions.

Sure we’re only at the beginning of this new adventure, but Microsoft should pay attention to what Apple is doing with its iPads to make them so popular, iOS is a mobile OS, destined to equip the tablet, the iPhone and iPod touch, with OS X Lion being the desktop OS that’s only going to be used on notebooks and desktops. And while OS X Lion borrows some of the features found in iOS to offer the user a seamless transition between the two operating systems, Windows 8 seems to offer two different Windows instances on the same device at the same time.

Finally, and as always with new tablet designs, we’ll remind everyone that besides a stable, eye-friendly OS it’s also all about the content available on the go: movies, TV shows, eBooks, apps and the web. Will Windows 8 tablets be ready to offer support for all of that at launch?

Video from This Is My Next

We’ll certainly return with more Windows 8 coverage, and I’m particularly interested to see how that tile-based WP7 user interface will be used on non-tablet PCs.