Sony Xperia Tablet Z Review

Introduction

Sony's second shot at Xperia slate glory, the Tablet Z, undoubtedly combines the best design and entertainment features the company can muster. It somehow managed to make the thinnest and lightest Full HD 10-incher out there, and made the whole package waterproof at that.

It is not easy to replicate Sony's achievement, as the Xperia Tablet Z also sports all bells and whistles we've come to expect from a modern day slate at a reasonable price, plus four 3D surround sound speakers, thus shaping it as arguably the best Android tablet around, on paper at least. Is it so when you get to use it for a while? Read on our review to find out...

Design

It is not everyday we see tablets with less than 9mm thickness, and only the Toshiba Excite X10 managed sub-8mm girth. Sub-7mm tablets? Just the Xperia Tablet Z, mind you, and at 17.46 oz (495 g), it is also the lightest in its category, even more astonishing for a waterproof slate. It can be submerged in three feet of water and stay there for 30 minutes, or get into a dust storm without any damage. While it's unlikely you'll be using the waterboarding feature for anything but bragging rights, the important part is that you won't be afraid to use it with wet hands in the kitchen to scroll through recipes, take it to the beach, or video chat in the rain, for instance.

The dry dimension numbers translate into an incredible holding experience from the moment you grab it for the first time, and managing a 10” tablet with one hand while you operate the screen with the other has never been easier on the wrist.


We aren't expecting any premium metal chassis in the thinnest and lightest 10-incher out there, and the Xperia Tablet Z is indeed wrapped in a soft-touch plastic, with rubberized sides, and tight protective flaps on top of the memory card, headphone and charging ports.

The only metal piece is the round aluminum power/lock key on the left, which is a signature trademark for Sony's flagship Xperias now. The volume rocker beneath it is a bit too thin to be comfortably pressed, and its key travel could be deeper.


The quad-speaker system at the bottom corners is water-tight, too, in line with the tablet's IP57 elements-resistant certification, and the music kept pumping after we briefly dipped the tablet in a water fountain. The four speakers are situated pretty well so as you don't cover them while holding the tablet with both hands, as so often happens on other slates.

The 8 MP camera on the back is placed a bit unorthodox at the upper corner, so have this in mind when arranging the tablet for a shot, so as you don't cover the lens with your finger. Also, at such record low weight and thickness, the tablet is prone to being carried from one room to the other grabbed by the corner, which smudges the lens cover if you grab it by the wrong one.


Display

Sony put a 10.1” 1920x1200 pixels sensor-on-lens display panel in the Tablet Z, meaning that the touch layer is directly placed onto the screen without the typical air gap in-between, making for a slimmer package, thus allowing for the record thin slate.

This air gap elimination also reduces reflection and increases backlight throughput, for a pretty decent outdoor viewing experience, even in direct sunlight. Sony boasts that this screen covers a full wide color gamut, bringing its Reality Display with Mobile BRAVIA Engine 2 down to a high-res Xperia tablet panel for the first time. That whole marketing speak translates into a display whose colors can look pretty saturated when showing pictures or video, though not up to the gaudy level of OLED screens.

In addition to the high brightness and vivid colors, the display panel sports very good viewing angles, too, though the vertical ones seem a tad wider than the horizontal.



Interface and functionality

Sony's tablet Xperia UI is painted all over Android 4.1.2 on the Tablet Z, with the Socialife profile taking a prominent placing, letting you mix updates from Facebook, Twitter and the like with info sources of choice. Sony promises update to Android 4.2 shortly after launch, but its own interface overlay has enough features to make it stick as it is.

The Small Apps suite, for instance, pins hovering windows on top of the interface to aid with multitasking includes seven apps or widgets you can detach and float on top of whatever else you are doing underneath.

The infrared sensor at the top of the tablet is put to good use with a dedicated floating app that lets you control your TV while working on something else, and the remote app has manual programming function in case a brand or make isn't in the list.


Sony also shortcuts the apps that provide access to its entertainment universe directly on the homescreen, so through the Music and Video Unlimited apps you can listen and watch the millions of songs, TV shows and movies in Sony's portfolio.

Processor and memory

Sporting a 1.5 GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, the Xperia Tablet Z is just shy of the latest processors from Qualcomm, like the Snapdragon 600/800, which shows in the benchmarks, too. The chipset is paired with 2 GB of RAM, 16 or 32 GB of storage, plus a microSD slot on the bottom for expansion.

While we wouldn't call the interface laggy, there is some hesitation while flipping through homescreens and in/out of apps, likely brought on by Sony's own Xperia UI which coats the stock Android interface.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	GLBenchmark 2.5 (Egypt HD)	Vellamo (HTML5 / Metal)
Sony Xperia Tablet Z	7657	19675	3492/31 fps	2260 / 646
Google Nexus 10	4446
Asus Transformer Pad Infinity	4204

Internet and connectivity

The default browser on the Xperia Tablet Z is Chrome, and Sony doesn't provide its own stock browser like Samsung or LG do. Mobile Chrome has been getting much faster and better lately, but if you long for Adobe Flash support you'd have to grab another browser from the Play Store and sideload Flash.


In addition to the basic Wi-Fi version of the Tablet Z, Sony provides one with a combined 4G LTE and 42 Mbit/s HSPA+ modem, in addition to the Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS, NFC and FM Radio connectivity. As with the previous Android tablet from Sony, we also get an infrared beamer, which is paired with a dedicated app, and lets you control your TV, home stereo and the like, using the tablet as a remote.

An MHL port at the bottom lets you wire up the tablet to a big-screen TV, and, as usual, you can't charge the tablet while connected to a computer through the port, only with the dedicated wall charger.

Camera

Sony put last year's 8 MP Exmor R sensor in the Tablet Z, skipping on the LED flash, which we can't say we miss that much on a slate. We do get a 2.2 MP front-facing shooter for video chat, though, which is able to record 1080p video in its turn. The camera app offers the full monty of Sony's shooting modes, like Intelligent Auto, Sweep Panorama, HDR, Burst Shot, nifty color effects and so on.


Pictures turn out rather soft and lacking detail from aggressive noise suppression, plus they are quite oversaturated - two features that Sony's mobile camera software settings seem to never be able to shake off lately. The Intelligent Auto mode is hit or miss, so we'd recommend sticking to the normal mode, and using one of the numerous scene presets if needed.


Video is captured with Full HD definition up to the fluid 30fps, and exhibits the same smudgy, oversaurated looks as the stills.

Sony Xperia Tablet Z Sample Video:



Sony Xperia Tablet Z Indoor Sample Video:



Multimedia

The picture and video gallery app of Sony's interface lets you edit the photos with a rich number of applied effects, plus options for enhancing and retouching them.


Sony's simple, minimalistic music player graces the Tablet Z with the usual Walkman branding, and offers a set of equalizer presets, Sony's xLOUD bass-enhancements, and the new S-Force 3D virtual surround sound mode, made possible by the four tiny speakers in the tablet's bottom corners.

While the speakers aren't incredibly loud, the output is pretty decent, and the touted surround sound modes like Studio or Club do make a difference. Sony also offers Clear Stereo, Clear Phase and Dynamic Normaliser options for minimizing cross talk, automatically setting the sound quality of the internal speaker, and averaging out the volume of songs, movies and so on, playback.


The tablet plays every major video format, including DivX/Xvid/MKV up to Full HD definition right out of the box, with no need to download an additional app, except for the extra features.

Battery

A decent 6000 mAh battery is sealed into the Xperia Tablet Z, providing for nearly 10 hours of video and 110 hours of music playback, Sony claims.

Conclusion

Sony succeeded in making the thinnest and lightest 10” Android tablet waterproof, and added four virtual surround speakers to all the prerequisites for a modern flagship tablet like high-resolution display and a quad-core processor. We'd wish the processor was a bit faster, but that's about the only gripe we have with the Xperia Tablet Z, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better Android tablet in the $500 range.

Actually the only alternative to the Tablet Z's value-for-money proposition is Google's Nexus 10, which is not sold everywhere and, despite the advantage of a record pixel density, has less sophisticated design, no expandable storage, no IR blaster and is not waterproof, so even at $100 less it might not cut it for you, compared to the Tablet Z.

Sony's best and brightest tablet, however, has to face the formidable iPad franchise competition when it ventures outside of the Android world, with the hundreds of thousands of tablet-specific apps available for it. Thankfully, the Xperia Tablet Z is positioned quite differently, as it sports a thin and light watertight chassis against the more premium, but thicker and heavier aluminum build of the iPad 4, and offers more features like expandable storage, IR blaster and quad-speaker system, so the likely buyers of both tablets would have minimum overlap.

Software version: 10.1.1.A.1.253

Sony Xperia Tablet Z Video Review: