Samsung shows off its first sliding tablet

ELECTRONICS MAKER Samsung has announced the launch of its first sliding tablet PC at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Microsoft Windows 7 PC 7 Series tablet is powered by Intel's Atom processor designed for small mobile devices, which is codenamed "Oak Trail". Rather than having just a touchscreen the machine has a sliding keyboard.

Scott Ledterman, director of mobile PC product marketing at Samsung Enterprise Business Division said that Oak Trail enables improved performance and sleeker devices.

He seems to be pitching it between a tablet and a netbook, basically giving a keyboardless netbook a keyboard.

Ledterman said that the Samsung Sliding PC 7 Series is an example of the deep collaboration between Microsoft and Samsung, from engineering to marketing. Which we guess is why it has Windows 7 rather than running Android.

The tablet weighs 2.2 pounds and is suited for both indoor and outdoor use with a 340-nit brightness 10.1-inch, 1366x768 high definition display.

It comes with a six-cell lithium-polymer battery and an innovative Eco Light Sensor, which conserves energy and adjusts screen brightness based on available ambient light, enabling the 7 Series tablet to last for up to 9 hours.

The tablet will come in 32GB or 64GB models and has an expandable 4-in-1 memory card reader. The solid state disk (SSD) drive and Samsung's Fast Start feature boot up the 7 Series in as little as 15 seconds, or restore from Hibernate and Sleep modes in three seconds. The SSD also fully supports multi-tasking.

Other than that it is pretty much an ordinary tablet with a keyboard, which we reckon is sort of a flat netbook. Samsung failed to mention the price. µ