Sony is betting you’ll buy one of its upcoming tablets for one big reason: They look like nothing you’ve seen before.
Codenamed the “S1″ and “S2″ for now, Sony’s two unreleased Android tablets depart from the usual square, flat slabs we’ve seen so far in 2011. Instead, the S2 design comes as a dual-screen, clamshell device, while the S1 is similar to many current tablets with one significant deviation — its funky, wedge-shaped form factor, which tapers from one end to the other.
“It looks like a magazine with the cover folded backwards,” a Sony spokesman said at a Wednesday event in San Francisco. “And the tablet’s center of gravity rests on the wider end with the hand holding the device.”
The stakes are high for Sony, as the company is one the of latest entrants to the tablet market. Of course, the iPad remains the market leader with a year-plus head start on other tablets, and over 90 percent of the tablet market share. The first Android tablet to debut this year was Motorola’s Xoom, which received lackluster reviews and complaints on the lofty price. A host of other tablets followed in Motorola’s footsteps, but compared to the iPad, customers aren’t opening up their wallets for Android devices. Sony hopes its drastic departure in design will differentiate its two tablets enough for you to snag them up.
To be sure, the changes are drastic. The clamp-down S2 device is wide enough to display five inches of visual real estate when opened, while still small enough to fit in your pocket — “or a purse,” says Sony — when closed. And considering the open-and-shut form, reading e-books on the S2 makes a certain amount of sense. Flipping between pages was effortless, mimicking the act of thumbing through an actual book. It would have been nice to see an animated page flip from one side to another; as it stands, the text only changes without any sort of virtual page flip. Still, it works for what it is.
The company is also boasting two of its software accelerated enhancements that come with the tablets: QuickView and QuickTouch Panel. With QuickView enabled, Sony claims web pages load much faster than they would on non-QuickView enabled tablets. In a demo on Wednesday, we saw the same web page load five seconds faster on a tablet with QuickView turned on compared to one without the software.
The QuickTouch Panel enables speedier scrolling on the devices, letting you move up and down a browser page faster, less jerky than you’d be able to on another device (or so Sony says). Scrolling seemed smooth in our demo, though we didn’t have another non-Sony tablet on hand to compare.
Sony’s tablets stack up to others in certain respects. They come with DLNA compatibility, Android Honeycomb, Adobe Flash capability — all mainstays in the Android tablet field.
But other than those broadly sketched features, Sony isn’t saying much more about their devices. We got zero information on hardware specs, pricing, specific release dates or even the actual device names.
We do know, however, that the S1 will be available in a Wi-Fi only version first, and the S2 will come carried on AT&T’s 4G LTE network. As a further perk of going with a Sony device, you’ll have full access to Sony’s PlayStation Suite, where you can access a library of 40 to 50 older PlayStation games on the Sony device.
What’s more, the clamshell-modeled S2 uses the bottom screen as a touch-sensitive, virtual control pad, while the top screen displays your game. It’s like Sony’s Xperia Play smartphone, only in tablet form.
Sony says to look forward to the tablets come the fall of this year.
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