Sony Xperia Tablet S Review

The Sony Xperia Tablet S is the second generation android slate from the Sony that comes with a slimmer design and a faster processor. It looks like a flip notepad that is designed to fall under the popular Xperia tag that user associate with Sony's Android devices. Sony Xperia Tablet S stands apart from the Android tablets because of its unique design, high resolution camera, a quad-core Tegra 3 processor, a BRAVIA-powered WXGA and 1080p screen.

Key features of the Sony Xperia Tablet S includes 9.4" 16M-color PLS TFT capacitive touchscreen of WXGA resolution (1280 x 800 pixels), 1.3 GHz quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU, ULP GeForce GPU, 1GB RAM, Tegra 3 chipset, Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, 16/32/64 GB of built-in memory, 8 MP autofocus camera, 1MP front-facing camera native video calls and many more. We will take a closer look in detail and see how its cool features translate into real life performance.

On the whole, the Sony Xperia Tablet S is a good home entertainment focused Android tablet that offers an elegant design, brilliant display and many useful built in features but has got poor performance issues as well as poor battery life.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S comes with a nice design. The metal design of the Xperia Tablet S should help get the attention of those who are tired of plastic devices. Furthermore, the Xperia Tablet S carries the flipped notepad look of Sony’s first tablet however the flipping part is much shorter now, and it just covers about a third of the back. This design change of the Xperia Tablet S comes very handy in holding the tablet for a longer period of time. Furthermore, because of its curved part you can easily carry the Xperia Tablet S around with one hand, and tiny dots make the grip even better.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S is also rated as splash proof, however there are some troubles associated with this feature. But the overall build quality feels rather sturdy. The Xperia Tablet S is much slimmer as compared to the first tablet, measuring at 0.35” (8.9mm) that goes to 0.47” (12mm) in the upper part, and also slightly lighter.

Its tapered back makes it easy to hold the tablet however the proprietary connector at the bottom is somewhat deep-set that makes plugging a cable to the tablet very difficult, especially when it is in its case. There is a regular SD card slot with a protective lid, furthermore the lock or power key and volume rocker are also present on the upper right side that you can easily find and press.

The front of the Sony Xperia Tablet S is occupied by a 9.4" 1280x800 pixel screen. The screen is surrounded by the thick bezel so that you can comfortably rest your thumbs on. The screen resolution is good in terms of colors, contrast ratio and viewing angles and display brightness. You can read the screen in direct sunlight rather with brightness set to maximum, but even at that point you have to angle it just so. The low-friction coating that company has applied to the screen is a bit complicating matter.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S works on Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS. Though, the Android OS is mostly associated with Google services but Sony has swopped out several of Google's accompaniments for its own. Some of the Sony’s services really stand out along with the new widgets and the huge availability of Sony apps. For example Walkman and Reader work very well. Furthermore, Music Unlimited and Sony’s PlayStation Mobile Store are also there for the music and game lovers.

There are also some unique features as well and among them “Guest Mode” stands out. With this, you can easily create additional accounts and can limit the apps that these accounts can have access to. In this way, parents can easily and comfortably let their children use the Tablet S, and let them play around with the family tab. However, even with the Guest Mode you cannot create separate email setups for each user. Therefore, you need to limit your Email Account App if you do not want your kids to get into it. Same applied to Web browsers as well. For this, you can download multiple email apps and multiple web browsers if you want your kids to use these apps so that you can give access to one of the email accounts and web browsers to your kids as well.

There is one more very nice feature of the Sony Xperia Tablet S that you can create mini apps out of any installed widget. However, you will face some issues while connecting to Wi-Fi. Overall, the Xperia Tablet S experience is a pleasing one except this Wi-Fi bug.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S comes with a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor clocked at 1.4GHz is powering the ICS interface. Furthermore, it boosts 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory, though there are 32GB and 64GB versions are also available. The Xperia Tablet S comes with a regular SD card slot, so if you buy one 64GB unit then you can have a total of 80GB storage.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S offers a usual set of wireless connectivity options such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS, and DLNA. You can also use the Infrared sensor to use the Xperia Tablet S as a universal remote control. Furthermore, the slate can also play a USB host, for connecting memory sticks for instance, and there is a File Transfer app for sending files from side to side. Moreover, there is no problem in panning around and using the browser on the Xperia Tablet S. it runs well and supports Flash as well.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S comes with an 8 mega pixel front camera and a front facing 1 mega pixel camera. The 8 megapixel camera that is present on the back of the slate performs a decent job and keeps image noise to the possibly minimum level. However, the details of the images being captured with the slate are somewhat waxy and lack the sharpness. This suggests that an 8 mega pixel camera of the Sony Xperia Tablet S is not that impressive as it should be.

Furthermore, the camera apps are also less impressive. For example the camera app that Sony has included in the Xperia Tablet S has a very ugly and confusing interface , and has a very small widow that shows you the picture you are about to take. So, if you want to take an 8 mega pixel shot then you will be forced into a 4:3 boxy aspect ratio.

You can record full HD videos if we talk about videos from the 8 mega pixel camera of the Xperia Tablet S, while the front facing camera is good for 720p. Though, the front facing camera is even worse but yet it is at least usable for Skype calls.

The videos are stored in MP4 format with 14Mbps bitrate for the 1080p video clips, and audio is stereo at 48kHz and 100Kbps. Whereas, the quality of videos is very awful even at 1080p resolution and a steady 30 frames per second indoors as well as out, with slow autofocus and frequently fluctuating auto-exposure.

Now, let us take a quick look at the multimedia features this slate offers. Album App has been used in this slate for displaying pictures and video as well as for arranging them in tiled grids in sequential order. The music player is Walkman-branded and is tied in with a minimalistic playback interface and a tiled view of tune categories again. The sound effects and equalizer presets are of the average quality and do not help the loudspeaker at the bottom. This means that they are neither too strong nor too clean sounding. Video files that are in MPEG-4 format can playback up to 1080 definition, and for DivX/Xvid/MKV support you would have to run to the Play Store.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S is the Sony's second try at an ergonomic tablet with a 9.4-inch screen and Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Though, there are some issues with the slate such as Wi-Fi glitches, some random hardware issues, Proprietary charger issue as well as poorly designed default keyboard, yet it is good for the people who want to use a full-sized tablet as if it's a one-handed e-reader.

Furthermore, the battery life is also below the average and HDMI requires dongle as well. The software is the holy crap the machine could have been really good if the software were not too bad. Moreover, there is a group of 'Small Apps' that Sony has added in the Xperia Tablet S that is sometimes convenient but mostly useless.

On the whole, the Sony Xperia Tablet S has so many good things such as it has a good design and a comfortable feel, not only it does look good but also has a smoother user interface as well. Moreover, its size makes this slate very comfortable to hold, even with a single hand. The hardware really works well like that of any other Sony's appliance, but these days good hardware without solid software is just nothing. The shortcomings are mostly quality-control issues such as Wi-Fi issues. Although, the company has fixed a paralyzing Wi-Fi bug but we still have problem pressing the power button. Moreover, you may find that the hardware elements, even though the slate looks and feels premium, are a little cheaper.

One should avoid the Xperia Tablet S until Sony gets these issues fixed. Moreover, the slate starts at $400, and for a machine with a price tag like that, everyone expect a tablet that can compete with the best machine in the market. To summarize, we would suggest going for an iPad 2 for the same price. On the other hand, you can add some few extra bucks to get an iPad 3 or if you want to give this slate a try then be aware of its limitations.