Sony Xperia Tablet Z Wi-Fi

SONY XPERIA TABLET Z Wi-Fi REVIEW

The Xperia Tablet Z is the first tablet and one of the first Sony devices to be released inside their new four screen strategy. Aimed to ensure that Sony have a reliable and clearly “Sony” experience across their Smartphone, Tablet, VAIO Laptop and PC’s as well as their TV’s the strategy should stop the attractive and great performing devices Sony have produced in the past being brought down by low resolutions, poor performing screens. Immediately when you turn the tablet on you’ll see that the strategy has succeeded for this device. Sony have delivered a really nice looking device that performs well, with good and expandable storage. Built to IP-57 standard, the tablet is dust proof and waterproof to 1.5 meters and is surprisingly resilient and solid for such a thin and light device (measuring only 6.9mm thick and weighing 495 grams). The screen is gorgeous, it runs 10.1-inch 1920 x 1200 TFT LCD (224ppi) at full HD. The screen is powered by Sony’s Bravia II engine (the same engine that runs their Bravia LED LCD TV’s) which gives it clean, crisp HD video production as well as second to none still image colour saturation. The one gripe I have with the screen and colour reproduction is that if you watch a video closely enough, you will find that blacks appear more grey than black. Sony have equipped the Xperia Tablet Z with a mammoth 6000mAh Lithium Polymer battery which in my testing has managed over 5 hours of true HD movie playback, a couple of hours of music, web surfing, email, forum trawling and several skype calls and still had over 30% of battery remaining. Sony have done exactly this, the rear facing camera in the Xperia Tablet Z is an 8.1 Megapixel camera that takes 3264×2448 resolution photo’s even in questionable light conditions. The video recording capabilities are just as good, 1080p recording at 30fps isn’t to be sneezed at on any device let alone a tablet. Sony have met the market expectations in having a front facing 2.2 Megapixel HD camera that is perfectly capable of taking appropriate quality video for Skype, Hangouts or other video calls that you may wish to make. There’s a host of connectivity options on the Xperia Tablet Z, while we reviewed the Wifi model. The Wifi offers 802.11 a/b/g/n on both the 2.4 and 5 Ghz bandwidths which offers some extra range when connected to the 5Ghz option not only this, but better speed too. The tablet has Bluetooth 4.0 which makes this one of the first 10 inch tablets to be released with the latest incarnation of the popular data and voice connectivity protocol. The range on Bluetooth 4.0 is pretty impressive, while paired with a set of Sony headphones the tablet can be left indoors and get a solid 12 – 15 meters of range even through multiple walls. As yet there’s only a couple of apps that are utilizing the NFC on the device. The performance of the Sony Xperia Tablet Z is as good as I’ve seen. The specs of the tablet are currently market leading in most respects and the performance of the device reflects these high specs. Web browsing is a pleasure because of the combination of the screen quality and the performance of the tablet giving the user smooth and predictable scrolling. High definition video is clear, smooth and offers vivid colour that has very good colour saturation and true to life colours. Out of the box the Tablet Z is running Android 4.1.2 which, while relatively up to date isn’t the latest version. A little trawling around the technical forums showed up very quickly that the Android 4.2.2 update has been reviewed. Generally speaking though, the powerful quad core Snapdragon CPU, 2GB of memory and Adreno GPU allow the tablet to effortlessly perform heavy duty tasks even while multitasking. Aside from a few notable exceptions, the Xperia Tablet Z is one of the leaders of the pack with Android tablet performance. Of all of the 10 inch tablets running Android the only true competitor in specs and performance to the Xperia Tablet Z is the Nexus 10 which is an outstanding device.

SPECIFICATION & FEATURES