[Sony Tablet S] Bojanglez:
Design

Initially I was a bit concerned that Sony had made their tablet a different shape just for the sake of being different, but having had a good play with it, it has become apparent that it was designed with both form and function in mind.

The curved 'folded magazine' design feels right when reading content in portrait view which is great for reading books and using Apps like Pulse. The textured back also enables you to grip the device easier without fear of letting it slip from your hand.

Some reviews have said it feels a bit cheap, I wouldn't use the word cheap, they have obviously tried to use lightweight materials (plastic) to keep it easy to handle for long periods. Despite this it still feels like a solid piece of kit.

Sony Software

I am a bit of an Android purist, I usually don't like it when companies put a load of crap of their own on. Luckily the user interface is largely untouched, only a few minor additions that some people will probably find useful. They have done a good job with extending the default media apps though.

The music app is really sexy, I love a good interface that utilises the album art. This is probably one of the best examples. The only issue I had was once I got an error message after dropping some music files on to the device saying "Unable to update database" or something, but a reboot sorted that.

The reader app is great, I have a load of epub files in my Dropbox, I just downloaded them and they appeared straight away in the library.

Video looks great, but as with a lot of these kind of devices codec support is a bit limited out the box. I was able to play pretty much every media file type I wanted (smoothly) once I installed RockPlayer and played them through that, worth doing if you can't be bothered re-encoding.

The social feed app is a good idea, but ultimately flawed (e.g. not being able to view comments on a facebook post). I prefer to look at Facebook, Twitter, Google+ in their respective apps. I guess for a quick overview of what is happening it might be adequate.

The standout inclusion is definitely the remote control app. I set up my Sky box, my Sony AV receiver, and my Samsung TV within about 5 minutes and now all are available from one place. Skipping between channels on sky by swiping the screen feels very natural, the novelty might wear off eventually, but not having to fumble for 3 separate remotes in the dark to switch on all 3 devices will be awesome

Apps Compatibility / Performance

A lot has been said in the past about the lack of apps for Honeycomb, to be honest I don't know what people are on about, every app I have tried seems to OK. Some you can tell aren't yet optimised for tablets (e.g. Facebook) but they still look pretty nice.

Most games I tried (Cut The Rope, Riptide HD, Samurai II) all look great on the big screen, and run smoothly. I haven't tried any games with a controller yet, but the size of the tablet is better for most of these games than on a phone.

I was concerned that games not designed for screen this size might be a bit crap or not run at all, but Kairosoft games (e.g. Game Dev Story, Grand Prix Story) actually benefit from the big screen (on my Galaxy S2 sometimes my fat fingers click the wrong things ).

My favorite Apps for this so far (only about 9 hours of time with it ) are Pulse and Youtube, both use the screen really well, I will be spending hours on those two in the coming weeks and months.

Generally the performance has been slick, not noticed any lag until I went on a site with quite a lot of flash on, then it did slow a bit. By default Flash is always on, but if you go to browser settings->Advanced->Enable Plugins you can set it to on-demand, which I think might allow you to say when an element should load.

Closing Comments

I was torn between this and the Samsung 10.1, but I think I have definitely made the right choice.

Wishlist

So far so good, but hopefully Sony will keep improving the device with software updates (like they do with the PS3 ). I would like to see..

Direct playback from SD card (currently you have to copy files to the build it storage using an app on the device).

Tighter PS3 integration, it would be great to use it as a remote play screen for the PS3. Also it would be cool to use the PS3 as a device to 'throw' content to (I will have to test again that this is not already there).

Oh and I hope that where possible PS1 games I buy on PSN will be usable on this device if they are released as PS Suite games (I hate having to buy the same games over and over *yes I am looking at you Nintendo*).