Here's a riddle: Why is Sony not like Apple and Amazon? Sony is a multimedia powerhouse with a long history of solidly designed products, a full-fledged movie studio, a massive record label, and one of the world's top gaming brands. The Sony Tablet S ($499 direct for 16GB, $599 for 32GB) tries to bring all of these legacies together, and it's one of the best-looking Android tablets around. But where Apple's and Amazon's tablets fuse device and content seamlessly, the Tablet S does not.
Physical Description and Battery Life
A truly unusual-looking tablet, the Tablet S is wedge-shaped, made of a very high-quality textured plastic. It's supposed to look like a magazine, with the cover folded back against the spine, and it does. The effect is to concentrate its weight in the part you're holding, making the 9.4-inch-screen tablet unusually comfortable to hold single-handed. The 9.7-inch Apple iPad 2?($499, 4.5 stars) tires my wrist very quickly, but the Tablet S feels like it weighs much less than its 21.2 ounces. The tablet measures 9.5 by 6.8 by anything from almost-zero to 0.7 inches, since it's sloped. (It works for both righties and lefties, though, since the screen changes orientation depending upon how you hold the tablet.)
Very-well-placed Power and Volume buttons are located in a recess on one side; on the other side there's a smooth cover over a full-sized SD slot and a miniUSB port, both used for transferring files. The 9.4-inch, 1280-by-800 screen is tight and relatively bright. The tablet connects to the Internet using 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and also has Bluetooth. I didn't have trouble initially connecting to our Wi-Fi networks, but the tablet took an irritatingly long time to reconnect when it woke from sleep in my tests.
Battery life was deeply disappointing. In our standard test, playing a video with the screen on maximum brightness, we got only 4 hours, 45 minutes. Compare that with 7.5+ hours from both the iPad 2 and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime ($499, 4 stars). We even tested it twice. The Tablet S just isn't a long-player.
OS and Apps
Running a heavily skinned version of Google Android Honeycomb, the Tablet S is built around a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2? processor. Tegra 2 is now about a year old, and benchmark performance is a bit behind Qualcomm S3 and Samsung Exynos-based devices, not to mention Nvidia's blazing new Tegra 3, which is found in the Transformer Prime.
This tablet has more bloatware than any I've ever seen, and it's all well-meaning but clumsy attempts to bring Sony's services together. Apple and Amazon do things the right way: One sign-on (preferably upon login) and you're in a unified, rich store full of diverse content.
Sony spews its various divisions across its tablet in a scattershot mess. The PlayStation gaming store requires a different login than the Music and Video Unlimited services, and you need yet another account for Sony Reader ebook content. The Ustream and Crackle video-streaming apps, meanwhile, are just kind of hanging out, unmoored from Video Unlimited.
A few apps are worthy of note. The PlayStation Store got me really excited, but all it has is a dozen games from the 1990s. Cool Boarders, MediEvil, and Destruction Derby all played smoothly, but they're more than a decade old. The fact that they're better than most Android games speaks to the sad state of Android gaming, not to the enduring excellence of the works of the '90s.
Select App is Sony's stab at taming the chaos of the Android Market, a virtual magazine spotlighting about two dozen apps a month. It isn't as good a solution as the custom app store on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus ($399, 3.5 stars) but it's still helpful.
The universal remote control app is excellent. I tried it with Samsung, Sharp, and Insignia TVs and TiVo and Dish set-top boxes, and it's quick and responsive, unlike the Peel Remote app on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. The button layout isn't quite as attractive as on dedicated hardware remotes, but it gets the job done.
While I was setting up the Tablet S's media services for testing, I ran into some bugs: things got sluggish at times, and sometimes the tablet spat out odd error messages. Trying to set up a PlayStation network account, for instance, gave me "an error occurred while performing this operation." Trying to install Cool Boarders, the tablet demanded that I first set my clock properly. And thumbnails in the music and video players didn't appear quite instantaneously.
Multimedia
Sony partitioned our tablet's 16GB of storage into 9GB for data, 4GB for apps and 3GB of untouchable preloads. That's a bit tight, especially at this price point. And there's no MicroSD card slot. Instead, there's a full-sized SD slot, but you can't directly access files from there. You have to "download" them onto the internal storage, preventing you from using the SD card easily to add memory. Boo.
The lack of storage is a pity because the customized music and video players are both solid and unusually fun. The music player not only has a great cover art view, it analyzes your music with a technology called "SensMe" to create Pandora/Genius-style automatic playlists of music that sounds good together. That's really cool; I just wish I could have more than a few gigabytes of it. Audio sounded fine through wired or Bluetooth headphones. The video player displays all your videos as large thumbnails. It played WMV, MP4, and H.264 videos at up to 1080p resolution, but couldn't handle XVID or DIVX videos.
Sony goes all-in with DLNA here, so there's no HDMI port. Instead, a DLNA app and 'Send To' buttons in the music and video players get your content to other Wi-Fi-enabled home theater devices. I've never considered DLNA easy to use, but Sony demoed it for me with some wireless speakers and it worked fine. Perhaps the trick is to mate your Sony Tablet with other Sony products.
There's a 5-megapixel camera on the tablet's back and a 0.3-megapixel camera for video up front. The camera app crashed repeatedly, to the point which I'd consider it unreliable. Still images captured with the rear camera were moderately sharp with little low-light blur.
Conclusions
The Sony Tablet S stands apart from the Android tablet pack thanks to its elegant design. It's genuinely attractively designed, which can take you far. But we're a hard-headed lot here, and we'll note that the same $499 can get you the even faster and more powerful Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime, or an Apple iPad 2?with a far better array of apps and better integration between its media services.
Sony tries to make the difference with content, but doesn't pull it off. The selection of PlayStation games is disappointing, and Music and Video Unlimited don't bring enough that you can't get from other sources such as Samsung's or Apple's stores. If they were less expensive or more seamless, things would be different. But they aren't.
The Sony Tablet S charges a premium for design. If you're an Android tablet lover with deep pockets, you may take to its unusually hand-friendly form. But for most people looking for a 10-inch tablet, we'd recommend the faster Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime or the more flexible Apple iPad 2.
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