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Part Android, part Windows, Samsung ATIV Q is both laptop and tablet

The Samsung ATIV Q, which was unveiled this week at a press event in London, is truly a flexible device. 

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Samsung
The Samsung ATIV Q.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Well, it's not in danger of winning any awards for the most evocatively-named new product. 

But the ATIV Q, the new "convertible" device unveiled this week by Samsung, does have an interesting premise: It's a hinged tablet/laptop with the ability to toggle back and forth between the Windows 8 and Android Jellybean 4.2.2 operating systems. In other words, the ATIV Q will run both apps from the Google Play store and traditional PC-compatible software (Microsoft Word and Angry Birds Seasons on the same machine!). 

"The ATIV Q sports an innovative hinge design that allows the user to transform the tablet into 4 functional modes," Samsung reps wrote in a press release today. "Lay the display flat over the keyboard for tablet mode. Raise the display upright to type just like a laptop. Float and adjust the display to a comfortable viewing angle. Or flip the display to place in the stand mode to watch movies with ease." 

The ATIV Q sports a 13.3-inch screen, with a 3200x1800 resolution – a lot of real estate for a tablet. Weight is approximately 2.84 pounds (chunkier than the 11-inch, 2.38 pound MacBook Air, but lighter than a lot of other laptops). And according to the Guardian, the camera on the ATIV Q "has a 20.3 mega-pixel resolution and can be fitted with a series of lenses, from compact pancake to ultra-wide fisheye, and longer zoom." 

Pricing and release date remain to be determined, although a UK launch is scheduled for sometime later this year. So how does the ATIV Q handle? Mat Smith of Engadget managed to get a hands-on with the device, and he offers some qualified praise. 

Samsung has "apparently worked hard to offer a very similar user experience to its Galaxy Tab range and our experience agreed with that – it felt like a slightly thick Android tablet when we were swiping around the web, menus or obligatory rounds of Angry Birds," he writes. "However, running on just a single Haswell processor (rather than splitting up the workload, as seen on the Transformer Book Trio) we're wondering how long the ATIV Q will run on the more lightweight workload of Android."

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

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