The Sony Tablet S made a great first impression in the spring thanks in large part to its unique shape in a sea of samey tablet form factors. What was most interesting about the device is that it was made by Sony, not Sony Ericsson (a joint venture which typically handled Android products). Now that the two are calling it splitsville, the decision makes a lot more sense. The inclusion of an infrared transmitter for TV remote control made it clear that Sony wanted to tailor the tablet more as a home electronics product rather than something closer to a big smartphone. Given Sony’s massive presence in the home entertainment sphere, the placement isn’t entirely out of place – in fact, the Tablet S fits quite nicely in the living room, but does it belong anywhere else?
Review: Sony Tablet S – an Android tablet just devoured a TV remote
- Infrared for TV control is the bee's knees
- Unique form factor
- Smooth, responsive software
- Playback in some video formats not supported
- No HDMI-out and DLNA home media sharing still limited
- Camera quality is ho-hum
Hardware
Right off the bat, the Sony Tablet S presents a striking profile. The majority of tablets out there are roughly interchangeable when it comes to looks, but the Sony Tablet S sticks out with its folded magazine-style design. The "magazine" is folded unevenly, so the bottom part is slimmer and well-suited for a docking station.
The Sony Tablet S is no slouch under the hood either - a dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2 processor and 1 GB of RAM powers the Android 3.2 device. All of the usual antennae are tucked inside, like Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. The 5 megapixel camera on the back, does a good job of close-ups, but not much else.
The 5000 mAh battery is big enough that you don't have to charge it more than once a day with casual usage. The 9.4 inch size limits how often I would take the Sony Tablet S out of the house, and the ongoing TV theme of the device didn't give it much of a home at my desk through the workday. That said, the day-to-day demand on the battery of a Tablet S isn't likely to be huge. If the battery life was worse, the proprietary charging plug would keep the tablet even closer to its television-side home, since the charging brick is too cumbersome to easily carry around, and it's unlikely that you'll go out and get multiple charging docks for different destinations. At least it charges up relatively quickly.
Design
The curved side of the Sony Tablet S fits great in the hand, though weighing in at little over a pound, you wouldn't want to for more than an hour or so. Luckily, the design also offers a slight angle when placed flat on a surface, which affords better viewing and slightly more ergonomic typing. Besides its unique shape, the Sony Tablet S earns a few other points in the design department.
The hardware buttons on the right side are tucked away in a clever fashion, and though you're occasionally operating them blindly when using the device face-on, it's usually not a big issue. The green notification light in the same area is very bright, and emenates from below the surface in a really cool way. Unfortunately, when you're charging, another LED pops on, which is a little distracting in combination with the notification light.
On the left side, micro USB and full-sized SD card slots are hidden away under a flap. This cuts down on visual clutter, and maintains a degree of style. The back of the device is covered by tiny indentations that curl up around the top, and though they offer a bit of grip, they're mostly just there for looks. Overall, I'm very impressed with the design of the Sony Tablet S, but the top feature is still the infrared sensor. More on that later.
Build Quality
With few moving parts, there's little to worry about when it comes to standard wear and tear. The micro USB flap may get a little ragged over time depending on how often you use it, and though the display made it through my trials without a scratch, the exterior chrome is plastic and susceptible to dings. If you plan on traveling a lot with the Sony Tablet S, odds are good that you'll pick up a folio or case of some kind, so damage is less likely, but the true home of the Tablet S is in front of the TV, which can be a high traffic and messy area.
Camera
I wasn't particularly impressed with the video taken on 5 megapixel camera on the back of the Sony Tablet S; without a flash, it's not ideal for taking stills in low-light, and even daylight landscape shots seemed a bit washed-out. That's not a huge loss, considering you look like a shmuck shooting pictures with a tablet anyway. The front-facing camera is good enough for Skype calls, but not much else. Still, the Tablet S has all of the usual scene mode, contrast, and exposure settings that you'd expect to see in Android. The close-ups taken on it are respectable, too.
The Sony Tablet S has a dedicated File Transfer app for handling exchanges with the SD memory card. While it's not something I used extensively, I could see it being useful out in the field for viewing, lightly editing, and sharing pictures fresh from a full-blown digital camera. That seems to me the best position for a tablet when it comes to photography, anyway, and the inclusion of full-sized SD card slot
Software
The Sony Tablet S runs Android 3.2, so you're getting all of the great new Honeycomb-tailored widgets made for the bigger screen, while still having access to the much wider variety of home screen widgets for smartphones. Sony has loaded up the Tablet S with a ton of their own applications, generally to link to their wide variety of online multimedia services. They even managed to snag an exclusive on Foursquare optimized for Android tablets. There's a ho-hum Social Feed app, which jams Twitter and Facebook feeds into a simple list. Here's a handful of performance benchmark results, if you're into that kind of thing.
- Quadrant: 1510, 1558, 1905
- Linpack: 58.241 MFLOPS/2.9 s, 54.303 MFLOPS/3.11 s, 51.548 MFLOPS/3.27 s
- NenaMark: 42.6 FPS
- GLBenchmark Egypt Standard: 17.4 FPS
- GLBenchmark PRO Standard: 28.5 FPS
- SmartBench: 3513 productivity index, 2276 gaming
Multimedia
The most notable feature of the Sony Tablet S is the remote control app, which lets you use your TV and other home entertainment peripherals thanks to the built-in infrared sensor. Infrared really isn't something you see every day, and I suspect the Tablet S will be the only Android device to have it for some time. Setting up remotes is really, really easy; a ridiculous number of appliance categories and manufacturers are already preloaded, along with multiple controller schemes. Even if you can't find yours, it's possible to teach the Tablet S your remote on a button-by-button basis just by pointing it at the tablet's front-facing sensor. In actual usage, the TV is as responsive to the Tablet S as any standard remote control, and for more casual viewing, you can switch to a simplified gesture-based remote. I would like to see the app expanded to include macro commands, so you could for example turn on the TV, cable box, and audio system with a single button press like advanced Logitec remotes can. Maybe if Sony opened up control to the infrared part of the device, developers could experiment with other, unexplored use cases like that.
Recent research shows that using tablets in front of the TV is pretty common among those that own one, and remote control is definitely a good way of appealing to that audience. Apps like GetGlue and Miso thrive on making TV watching social, and smart tie-ins by DirectTV enable devices like the Tablet S to know exactly what you're watching while you're watching it. Throw DLNA connectivity so you can shoot out tablet-stored media to network-enabled TVs and stereos, and you've got a powerful couchside friend with the Sony Tablet S. There are a few caveats, mind you. DLNA still isn't robust enough to do stuff like wireless device mirroring on its own. This would be ideal for watching YouTube and other streaming online video via the Tablet S. An HDMI-out port would have at least enabled that much, even though you would have to deal with the inconvenience of wires or docking. At least there are apps like Skifta available to extend the core functionality of DLNA to include a selection of streaming services.
As a media device on its own, the Sony Tablet S does reasonably well. The external speakers are a little too tinny for me, but the full-sized SD card slot combined with either 16 GB or 32 GB of local memory makes storage a negligible problem. Full-sized SD is uncommon, only seen recently in the Toshiba Thrive, but its addition rounds out the Tablet S as a multimedia companion for cameras, as mentioned earlier. Video playback was hampered by a series of uncompatibilities; I couldn't get a handful of .mov, .avi, or .mkv files to play back. It's too bad, because the 1280 x 800 display is good enough to display HD video.
At least the Tablet S leverages Sony's sizeable collection of entertainment licenses to provide a variety of streaming services. Crackle is a free on-demand video app, and for those that don't want to sit through ads, there's Video Unlimited for direct purchases and rentals. Personal Spaces is supposed to let you share and view pictures and video, which might be handy for remote access to your albums, but I couldn't get the app to run reliably. Crackle was spotty, too. Sony's Reader property also has a home on the Tablet S, if e-books are your bag. The Tablet S is PlayStation certified, so you can buy PS1 games for about $7 a pop. I'm not exactly frothing at the bit to play Crash Bandicoot on a daily basis, but the option is there for nostalgic gamers.
After all is said and done, I spent more time using the Tablet S as a TV companion rather a media player (or anything else, for that matter). Aside from the remote control capabilities, that entails looking up actors, checking-in on social networks, and flipping through Facebook during commercials. If those are things you spend a lot of time doing, then the Tablet S is definitely worth consideration.
Web Browser
The web browser is standard fare for Android, complete with favourites, multiple windows, and Flash support. Flash is up to version 11 now, which is a marked improvement over the initial 10.1 release; the framerate improved by 20 FPS in one of my tests between the two. Browsermark, which measures JavaScript and HTML rendering, gave me a score of 88365 when averaged across three tests.
The Final Take
I would deign to call the Sony Tablet S the ultimate TV companion gadget, but among tablets, it's the best currently available, even if it's only because of the built-in infrared remote control. HDMI-out, more robust DLNA capabilities, and more reliable local video playback would help the Tablet S do better as a stand-alone multimedia device, but a dearth of Sony services means a wide variety of content is always in reach. I'd love to see some firmware updates that open up the infrared capabilities to third-party developers, which would in turn introduce a fresh breed of apps the likes of which we haven't seen since the Palm's pre-webOS days. For dedicated couch potatoes, it's hard to suggest any other tablet, but if you don't watch a lot of TV, then the bulk of the appeal of the Sony Tablet S compared to other Android tablets might be lost on you.
Like most tablets, the entry model will cost you $499.99, so if all you need is a browser and some casual app access, it might be worth holding out for the $200 Kindle Fire or the competing Kobo Vox.
P.S. Sorry about the screwy lighting in the video. Needed a new lightbox to fit 10-inch tablets, and this one didn't turn out so hot.