It
has taken two years for Sony to enter the tablet market, and in that
time every manufacturer and their budget Taiwanese spin-off have
colluded to fill the tablet market with dross.
This presents both
and opportunity and a threat to Sony, and while there are many
sub-standard tablets on the market, some great work has been done by a
few companies, and there's now a handful of successful, great value
Android tablets to choose from.
You can check out our Android Tablet round-up to see how this slate measures up against three of its rivals below:
Aside from the obvious iPad 2, which is the gold standard of design and usability, Samsung has unleashed a flurry of tablets, from the excellent Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, to the imminent Galaxy Tab 7.7 which boasts a vibrant AMOLED display.
Other notable competitors also include the Motorola Xoom, which is now aggressively priced at £349, and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, and soon-to-be-released Eee Pad Slider, which both boast full, physical QWERTY keyboards.
To
launch into this crowded marketplace, Sony had to release something
different, and with the Sony Tablet S and the forthcoming Tablet P,
that's exactly what its done.
The Sony Tablet S is a curvaceous,
wedge-shaped tablet, which looks as if it has been folded out of a
single piece of textured black plastic. It's thicker at one side, with a
rounded edge, as if you'd taken a thin paper back, and folded the cover
back on itself to really get stuck into the story.
Aside from
making it look different to every other tablet on the market, the Sony
Tablet S's unique appearance isn't purely aesthetic. The design means
that typing is comfortable when laid flat on a table or desk, which is a
flaw in most flat tablets. The book-like design makes it easy to grip with one hand, making it perfect for browsing the web or reading ebooks.
The
Tablet S weighs just 600g, which makes it identical in weight to the
iPad 2. There's a plastic finish, which doesn't feel cheap, and it has a
textured back which offers grip for your hand.
While Sony has
done well to make the form stand out from its peers, the specs are a
standard affair emulating their rivals closely. There's a dual-core
Tegra 2 processor clocked at 1GHz, 1GB of memory, capacitive
touchscreen, and an SD expansion slot. The
Sony Tablet S also comes with a range of other features, which make it
really stand out from the crowd. There are front and rear cameras, 1080p
video capture and playback, PlayStation certification, which enables
users to access a range of exclusive titles, and a host of Sony created
apps, including a universal remote for controlling other Sony products.
The
tablet comes in two iterations, with 16GB and 32GB options available,
and it has set pricing at £399 for the 16GB version. This in itself is
an admission by Sony to the ferocity and difficulty of the tablet
market.
Sony tends to market itself as a premium manufacturer, and
set its pricing accordingly, but at £399, it has decided to compete
directly with companies it would look down upon in other markets.
Interface and apps
The
Sony Tablet S ships with Android 3.1, which is Google's dedicated
operating system for tablet devices known as Honeycomb. This improves
browsability on a larger screen, unlike the first tablets which ran the
smartphone version of Android.
Honeycomb is a great operating
system, and offers everything you need from a tablet, which is helping
to put Android tablets on an equal footing with the iPad.
Press
and hold on the screen, and you will be taken to a selection of
widgets, apps, and other additions to your desktop. It's easy to get it
set up your way, but we can't help but feel that Honeycomb has a long
way to go until it's as usable as iOS. Sony
has enhanced the standard Android Honeycomb interface, without changing
the design, so it feels more intuitive than other tablets. The home
screen stays the same, with the addition of a favourites button next to
the apps menu, so you can quickly access your most-used applications.
Sony
has also placed some handy quick launch buttons in the top left, so you
can access the browser, email and a social feed reader app, which
brings together your Twitter and Facebook accounts into one manageable
place. In
a bid to make the interface more intuitive, Sony has made some tweaks
to Honeycomb which are unique to the Sony Tablet S. The apps menu itself
has received a bit of a makeover, so it's a little more responsive to
your finger, and you can sort the icons by newest first, A-Z, and even
add your own separators in, to totally customise the look and feel.
Sony
has also made some tweaks to the responsiveness of the touchscreen to
your finger, and the effects are immediately noticeable.
The main
area these tweaks manifest themselves is the on-screen keyboard, and
this is one of the best in the business. You can type quickly and
accurately, even in spite of the smaller screen size. In
landscape mode, the full QWERTY keyboard has a numeric keypad on the
right hand side, which is a fantastic addition, and means you don't have
to flick keyboard modes, like you do on the iPad.
This makes
typing a lot easier, and combined with the wedge-shaped design offering
up the keypad to a usable angle when aid flat, we have one of the best
tablets for typing, without a physical keyboard. Apps
The
Tablet S ships with Android 3.1 and is instantly upgradeable to the
latest 3.2 version, which enables all users to access to the Android
Marketplace with its selection of 300,000 apps.
While the gap has
closed between the iOS and Android app stores in terms of the number of
apps on offer, we still feel that there's a long way to go before
Google can match the quality of Apple's apps.
A browse of the
Android Market doesn't yield the selection of big names that you'd find
on the App Store, and scratching below the surface often means
disappointing quality, which Apple simply would not accept. However, it
by far surpasses the app stores of BlackBerry and HP.
Sony has
tried to address this issue with a choice of its own apps. Proprietary
app stores normally cause us to emit a disgusted groan, but this is an
area which makes the Sony Tablet S really stand out. There
are feed readers and mail clients, which offer nothing which isn't
already on the Marketplace, but also some great games and a handy
universal remote app.
The Sony Tablet S is PlayStation certified,
and the tablet has been released with a PS1 port of Crash Bandicoot and
Pinball Heroes game.
The PlayStation factor makes the Sony
Tablet S a great buy for gamers, but at the moment, the number of titles
is quite pitiful. We really hope that the selection of games increases
exponentially over the coming months.
Sony fans who have kitted
their home out with the Japanese giant's wares will also love the
universal remote. This uses Infrared to allow you to control your TV,
PlayStation 3, Blu-ray player and other Sony gizmos, all from the
comfort of your living room.
Sony has also added its own music
service, which offers access to 9 million tunes for £9.99 a month, and
also an on-demand video service, which is again available as part of a
subscription.
Performance and gaming
When it comes to performance, the Sony Tablet S really comes into its own.
Using
the operating system is fast, and every swipe is rewarded with smooth
dragging of screens and apps, and there was no slowdown whatsoever.
Despite
the great specs, rendering was an issue on certain websites, which
caused strange half page displays and juddery scrolling. One
of the worst offenders was Sony's own app store called Select App,
which is where you find the PlayStation titles, and this was extremely
frustrating and slow to use.
We also found issues when rotating
the screen, and it often stuck, before jerking into place- and while it
didn't ruin the experience, it's touches like this that show why the
iPad 2 is so good.
Battery life was a standard affair, and the
boost in performance seems to have had a knock-on effect in longevity.
We found the Sony lasted around 4 hours when playing demanding video,
around 9 hours of web browsing and game playing, and around 30 hours of
occasional coffee table web browsing. The iPad is pretty light on media and connectivity, but this is another area where the Sony Tablet S excels.
You
can add an SD card to the 16/32GB of built in memory, and there's also a
MicroUSB connection for added files to your tablet. However, storage is
an issue with the Sony.
The first bugbear is that a MicroUSB
cable isn't sold with the tablet, which will be an annoyance for anyone
who takes the Sony Tablet S home, to start transferring media, music and
video.
The second is that an exploration of the file manager
reveals that on the 16GB model, only 9GB is available to use. What's
more, with everything that comes installed as standard, you only have
7GB to play with. This
is partly due to a partition that the Sony makes, to keep the operating
system and file system separate. When we received the tablet, only
3.7GB was available for apps and system files.
With a total of 9GB
for the file system, and 4GB for the system files, a whopping 3GB is
M.I.A, presumably lost when formatting the system, which makes that SD
expansion slot look all the more necessary.
We had high hopes for the Sony as a media tablet, but unfortunately, the Tablet S fell short of our expectations. We
loaded the Tablet S with three movies, but neither of our .MKV movies
were recognised. The third, which was a standard definition .mp4 movie
played fine, but the lack of support for this popular format left us
disappointed.
The screen is also a bug-bear on the Sony Tablet S,
and again we felt let down. It's sharp and clear, but it's just not very
bright, and this really hit home while watching our movie. The Samsung
Galaxy Tab 10.1 screen is much more vibrant, and a real media lover's
tablet. Gaming
As we mentioned, the Sony Tablet S is PlayStation certified, which means there are a host of PlayStation titles to enjoy. These
games use a mix of touchscreen controls on the newer games such as
Pinball, and an on-screen PS1 pad on ported titles such as Crash
Bandicoot.
Using an onscreen joypad takes some getting used to,
and with no tactile buttons to guide you, we were forever pressing the
wrong button, and it did feel imprecise. It
doesn't take long to get into it, and with a bit of trial and error,
the controls were soon mastered, and we ended up loving the gaming
experience.
The size and shape of the Sony Tablet S really helps
you play for extended periods, with the buttons well positioned near the
left and right hand sides of the screen. If
you're a fan of old PS1 titles, this tablet is for you, let's just hope
Sony honour their commitment, and keep bringing out good retro games.
Camera
Like
most tablets, Sony has included front and rear cameras, and these tend
to be a half-hearted affair, with dubious quality and limited use. The
front camera is designed for video chatting with Skype or other clients,
and the rear camera for taking snaps for sharing online.
Sony has gone with a 5MP camera on the rear of the tablet, which is capable of capturing high-definition video.
Video
quality is good, with smart focusing and a fantastic frame rate
resulting in smooth playback. Sony's heritage in video processing really
comes to the fore here, as this makes up for what's lost in mediocre
picture quality. See full res imageWhen
it came to picture quality, good frame rates don't save the day, and
shots looked washed out, and grainy, even in good light.
At 5MP we didn't expect much, and quality was very much on par with the equally uninspiring iPad 2. See full res imageOpting
for 0.3MP sensor with VGA video quality on the front facing camera
yielded the results one would expect. Picture quality was lifeless,
grainy and noisy.
Video was slightly better, and anyone who has
tried to chat with friends over a web cam will always appreciate smooth
video over a higher quality, choppy feed. See full res imageWith
the Sony Tablet S you could enjoy a video chat on Skype with a friend,
but the quality was no-where near that of Apple's Facetime.
Unlike
Facetime, there's no built-in app for video chatting with friends, so
you will need to visit the app store, to get one of the popular video
chat apps, such as Skype.
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