Sony Tablet S Review

Sony has an enviable record of producing top-quality, high-end laptops, but its attempts to jump on the budget portable bandwagon have so far met with mixed success. It ignored netbooks until it was too late, and even tried to reinvent the genre with the ill-fated, pocket-sized P Series.

Its belated entry into the tablet race, the Tablet S, is a much more mainstream affair. Pricing is on a par with the iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: the 16GB Wi-Fi version costs £399, and the 32GB is £480, while the 16GB 3G model costs £500. It has a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 CPU and 1GB of RAM running Android Honeycomb 3.2.

Sony being Sony, though, things aren’t left at that. In fact, in a market where it’s becoming increasingly tough to stand out, the Tablet S is something of a guiding light. It boasts a unique wedge-shaped profile, which has a number of advantages. When you pop it down on a desk, it sets the screen at a slight angle so you don’t have to hunch over to see the screen and type. The thick edge gives you a good chunk to grip onto, and most of the weight is at that edge, making it much more balanced to hold in one hand than its rivals. The 586g weight, smaller 9.4in screen and grippy, textured rear panel also help.

Other practical additions include a micro USB socket that can be used not only as a means of transferring files from PC/laptop to tablet, but also as a USB host, allowing you to connect extra storage, a keyboard, mouse or game controller via a converter cable (not included). There’s also a full-sized SD card slot, so supplementing the 16GB or 32GB of storage is simple. The one major omission is an HDMI output.

The best part is that although the textured plastics don’t feel as expensive as those in the Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Tablet S looks every bit the premium device. Its thin edge tapers down to 9.8mm, the sides are shaped so the tablet looks like a folded-over sheaf of paper, and the gloss black contrasts satisfyingly with matte silver plastic. It’s a very handsome piece of kit.

Sony’s other main innovation focuses on home entertainment, with the Tablet S featuring an infrared emitter, allowing it to be used as a universal remote control. As you’d expect, setting up new devices is straightforward: select the manufacturer from a list, then the product type, and cycle through the options provided until you hit upon something that works.

In a few minutes, we had a Samsung TV and Windows Media Center PC up and running, then took it to another house and set up a Sky HD box and Panasonic Viera TV. We struggled when it came to more esoteric AV components: stereo amplifiers are limited to seven manufacturers, and we couldn’t find ours on the list; and there was no sign of the Virgin Media TiVo DVR.

But the good news is the tablet can also “learn” commands, so if you can’t find your device in the tablet’s very long list, you’ll be able to program it in. And once set up, it all works beautifully.

There’s no point in innovating if you don’t do the basics right, and we’re happy to report that Sony has got it spot on. The 1,280 x 800 resolution display is top class, boasting superb brightness and contrast. We measured the former at 379cd/m² and the latter at 733:1 – on a level with the iPad 2. Suffice it to say, movies and pictures look outstanding, and good viewing angles mean it’s just at home acting as a shared photo album as a personal movie and music player.

Menu scrolling and the like feel immediate and smooth, as do web page panning, zooming and scrolling actions. And when pushed through our set of benchmarks, the Sony produced the sorts of figures we’ve come to expect from a top tablet: the BBC desktop homepage loaded in four seconds, the SunSpider JavaScript test finished in 2,191ms, and it scored 1,805 points in the Android Quadrant benchmark. Battery life is acceptable: it played our low-resolution video continuously for 8hrs 41mins before running out of juice.

The camera is excellent: not up to the standards of the best smartphones, but strides ahead of the tablet competition, with good contrast and decent autofocus and a lot less of the hideous, smeary over-compression that afflicts so many of its competitors. It’s a shame there’s no flash to help out in low light, though.

Software

As is increasingly the case with Honeycomb tablets, Sony has tweaked the interface in various ways and thrown in a bundle of extra software. On the desktop, Sony adds four small (rather ugly) shortcut icons at the top of the Honeycomb desktop next to the Google Search and Voice Search options, for the browser, the remote app, the social networking app and email.

In the top-right corner of the Android desktop is a shortcut to another frivolous extra – the Favourites screen, which groups recent apps and activities together in a sort of 3D video wall. Sony has also replaced the standard Honeycomb icons for many of the core Google apps with its own. Quite why, we couldn’t say.

Fortunately, the changes aren’t all bad. We like the revamped app drawer, which sees a change of colour scheme (from black to white) and scrolling orientation (it’s now vertical rather than horizontal), plus the addition of various viewing and organisational tools. Apps can be sorted alphabetically, or by “Newest first”. Custom dividers can be used to split apps into groups, and shortcuts rearranged with a quick drag of the finger. And the screen can be viewed in two-column or grid layout.

PlayStation certification means the Tablet S will be able to play old-school PS One games, with two titles included as tasters: the venerable Crash Bandicoot and Pinball Heroes. Yet the PlayStation Store app needed to purchase further games wasn’t up and running when we wrote this review. Sony says it will release this sometime in October.

Sony includes its own music and video apps, both of which come in addition to the existing standard Honeycomb offerings. The principal appeal of these – aside from a rather attractive cover art “coffee table”-style view, which allows you to rummage through albums as if they were strewn on a flat surface in front of you – is the ability to “throw” music and video from the tablet to a suitable DLNA-compatible device. It’s a great idea, but not one that currently works very well. It recognised Windows Media Player on our network, but refused to play any file we attempted to send across.

There are also improved camera apps, Sony’s own ebook reader software, a social networking app that aggregates Twitter and Facebook feeds, a DLNA client for streaming music and video across the network to the tablet, plus links to the company’s Music and Video Unlimited services (although again, the service wasn’t yet up and running when we tried to test it).

Verdict

There’s a lot packed in, and despite some ragged edges the software line-up certainly adds plenty of value. And that’s the picture we take away from Sony’s Tablet S as a whole. It may be unusual, but it isn’t quirky for the sake of it. The design works very well, the universal remote control facility is a stroke of genius and it’s backed up by solid performance in all the key areas: the camera is good, the screen is excellent, the battery life fine, and performance well up there with the best.

In terms of sheer desirability, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has a brighter screen and slimmer, sexier profile, while the iPad 2 has its far larger library of tablet-specific apps to give it an edge. But we have to say Sony’s new baby runs them very close indeed.

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