This stylish, waterproof featherweight is hobbled by some traditional Android disadvantages
When we talk about gadgets, we tend to lump smartphones and
tablets together. But in many ways, they’re strikingly different product
categories.Among smartphones, for instance, the iPhone has usually competed with at least one high-profile, big-selling Android model–most famously ones in Samsung’s Galaxy S line. But there’s no Android tablet that’s done well enough to feel like the full-sized iPad’s peer. Instead, Apple’s tablet has remained the Goliath of the category, and an Android army of Davids has haphazardly ganged up on it with limited success.
One of those Davids has been Sony. The company started out making quirky tablets which went out of their way not to resemble the iPad too much. Then it released the Xperia Z, which was a lot more iPad-like than its predecessors, but with some features which the iPad lacks, such as a water-resistant case.
The newest Sony tablet is the Xperia Z2–not to be confused with the phone of the same name. As the name indicates, this is an evolutionary advance on the Xperia Z, rather than a radical rethinking of what a tablet should be. At $500 for a model with 16GB of storage, the Z2 costs the same as the iPad Air; unlike a bargain tablet such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX, it aspires to compete with Apple purely on quality, not price.
There’s a lot that’s very nice about this tablet: It’s both Sony’s best tablet to date and one of the best Android models, period. But as with other Android tablets, trumping the iPad Air in certain respects doesn’t mean you’re in the same Zip Code when it comes to overall experience.
Good: The Size, Weight and Overall Feel
I also like Sony’s soft-touch back, which feels a bit reminiscent of a leatherette cover on a classy old hardcover book, without reducing itself to actively mimicking stitched leather like some recent Samsung gadgets. Basically, this is a really nice tablet to hold.
Bad: The Screen’s Aspect Ratio
But in every other respect, it makes for a more awkward experience than if the horizontal and vertical dimensions were more similar. The Z2 is oddly skinny in portrait mode, and typing on the full-sized keyboard in landscape mode is awkward. (Sony does give you a wacky-yet-effective mini-keyboard option, though–it sits in the lower right-hand corner of the screen where you can jab at it with one thumb.)
Good: It’s Splashproof
Good: Android’s Interface Shines Through
Unlike Samsung–which likes to pile its own features on top of Android, such as the ability to stick four apps onscreen at once–Sony hasn’t tampered too much with Google’s software design. If you’re familiar with Android in its unvarnished form, you won’t have trouble finding your way around the Z2. And with a quad-core Qualcomm processor and 3GB of RAM, it’s got enough hardware oomph to keep the interface zipping along.
Most of the stuff which Sony has added makes sense. There’s a universal remote-control app which lets you command your TV using the tablet’s built-in infrared transmitter, for instance. And an image-processing program can blur the backgrounds on photos from the 8.1-megapixel rear camera–nothing like the effect you can get with a serious DSLR camera, but still fun to fiddle with.
Bad: The Third-Party Android Tablet App Situation
Bad: Dueling Content Stores
With the Z2, the duality is more striking than usual, in part because Sony is such a major purveyor of digital content. The Z2 plays up Sony’s own music and movie stores, and plunks a prominent What’s New widget on your home screen, with “recommendations” of movies, albums and apps.
I recommend ignoring those recommendations. What’s New suggested I buy a Spider-Man game from Gameloft’s site–which made me enter my credit-card details and download it through the tablet’s web browser, a clunky process which failed the first time I tried–rather than simply getting it from the Google Play store. Rather than linking to Google Play for video, the widget links to Sony’s video store, where prices are often the same as Google’s but sometimes higher or lower.
A company like Sony is never going to come to terms with this, but with Google Play onboard a tablet, additional sources of content are largely redundant. Maybe when you set up an Xperia tablet for the first time, you should get to choose between either Sony’s stores or Google’s as your primary sources of content–and the tablet could then tuck the ones you didn’t select into an out-of-the-way folder.
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