Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
The Samsung Ativ Tab comes with a fairly standard selection of apps for a Windows RT tablet.
Other than the media apps we covered on the previous page, the bulk of it is made up by the likes of a calendar, a maps app - which could be described as functional but not particularly feature rich or attractive - and Bing Finance - which is home to various finance updates and related news stories.
There's also a sports app that's similar to the finance one, just displaying sports results and news stories pulled from Bing. Plus there's a travel app that enables you to search for flights, locations and hotels, and a weather app with detailed forecasts.
Of course there's also an email app, which seemed to have some trouble syncing with our email for some reason, but once it did it worked well, fitting emails to the screen and making it very easy to flip between them, read them and respond.
More interestingly, the Samsung Ativ Tab comes with not just SkyDrive but also Box (another cloud storage site), making it easy to upload and download to or from either of them.
The best inclusion, though, is undoubtedly Microsoft Office, since this is something that neither Apple nor Android can claim to have, and it's an impressively full-featured version of it for a tablet.
You get Word, PowerPoint, Excel and One Note, and they have pretty much all the features you'd hope for. Word, for example, has dozens of fonts to choose from. You can also add headers and footers, change the margins and a whole lot more - just like on the desktop version.
While it's unlikely many people will do much serious work on a tablet, it's still nice to have in a pinch. And of course you can always buy a physical keyboard add-on, and at that point it really starts to become useful to business users, though at that point you also have to wonder if you wouldn't just be better off with a laptop.
Beyond the built-in apps you also have access to the Store, which is home to many more.
Compared to Android or iOS it's actually a very limited selection, but it's easy to navigate and there are at least a handful of apps to fill most needs. Somewhat surprisingly, Skype isn't included out of the box, but it can be downloaded from the Store.
On the games front you don't get any included with the Samsung Ativ Tab, and as with apps the selection from the store is rather smaller than the two biggest tablet operating systems.
That said, thanks to Xbox support there are some pretty great games that you can't get on any other tablet, such as Hydro Thunder Hurricane and ilomilo plus. Gaming performance is generally smooth - in our limited time with the tablet we had only a couple of minor performance hiccups.
Xbox integration also means that if you have an Xbox 360 you can view your friends list, read messages and check recent activity from the tablet.
Ultimately it's not as good for games as an iPad 4 - not even close - but it's not terrible, and if you've got an Xbox you might find the integration appealing.
