SONY Tablet S(16 GB)

The SONY Tablet S

Sony's track record in industrial design, hardware engineering, gaming, and media makes it the best possible candidate to challenge Apple's iPad. A year and a half after Apple's tablet debut, Sony is striking back with an Android 3.2 slate that is bound to turn heads and win some fans.

It represents an elevation in the art of making Android tablets, and offers a genuinely fresh take on tablet design.

Design
Sony's tablet is easy to spot in a lineup. Its unique wedge shape gives it a futuristic look and provides improved balance in your hand compared with the flat competition. As seen when placed on a table, the screen's forward slant minimizes glare and makes it more comfortable to type. The tradeoff is that the Tablet S doesn't achieve the same thinness as an iPad 2, though the Tablet S is just as light at 1.3 pounds and feels more solid than the reigning Android slate, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Around the sides you'll find buttons for power and volume, speakers, a headphone jack, and a tethered cover protecting a Micro-USB sync connection and a full-size SD card reader. A built-in app handles moving files back and forth from your card. It's worth noting that unlike other Honeycomb tablets, the SD card reader here functions just for media transfer and isn't meant to act as a memory expansion port.

Features
Take as read that you get Google's full Android 3.1 experience. Everything from Gmail to Google Talk (with video chat) comes ready to go right out of the box. Sony's own Reader software is included, alongside Google Books. And last but not least, both of Sony's tablets are PlayStation-certified, and run emulator software allowing them to play select PS One and PSP game titles. The original PS One hit Crash Bandicoot comes preinstalled, along with a version of Pinball Heroes.

Sony has also included some interesting options for pushing media content from these tablets onto DLNA-compatible speakers, PCs, or TVs (and not just Sony's). You can think of it as Sony's answer to Apple's AirPlay media streaming, only more broadly compatible with third-party technology.

Also playing into Sony's focus on the tablet as a living-room entertainment device is the inclusion of an IR blaster and universal remote app on the Tablet S. The result is a graphically rich remote that you might actually want to use.

The tablet has plans of hitting the market late 2012. We’ll have to wait till then to get our hands on a perfectly sculpted work of art..!!