Sony Releases Portable Tablet

In a market riddled with similar slates, no one's going to accuse Sony of adopting a copycat tablet strategy. First the company released the Tablet S, a tablet seemingly inspired by a folded-back magazine, and now comes the Tablet P, which draws its design from some combination of a Nintendo 3DS and a Kyocera Echo. We’ve been hearing about the Tablet P for more than a year, originally as the Tablet S2, and now it’s finally available: the clamshell device has two 5.5-inch displays, a Tegra 2 processor, dual cameras, Android 3.2, and data connectivity through AT&T's HSPA+ network. It's available for $399.99 with a two-year AT&T contract, or $549.99.
That the Tablet P comes in a phone-sized package is telling — the tablet has a surprisingly small footprint. Out of the box, the device is 3.1 inches wide by 7.1 inches tall and one inch thick, with a silvery plastic shell and black accents. It slips nicely into a jacket or even a jeans pocket (assuming you wear pretty baggy jeans), and at 13.1 ounces it won't weigh you down too much. The smooth case is interrupted only by the slightly protruding hinge, the camera lens, and four tiny feet that make the tablet sit upright even though its back is rounded. There's also a small rectangular notch cut out of the front of the case, where you pry open the device — a notification LED rests in the same spot, and glows green when you have a waiting notification.

Most of the external buttons are grouped on the right side of the bottom display: there's a power button, an AC adapter port (the Tablet P won't charge via USB, which is a bummer), a Micro USB port, and volume buttons that are so small and recessed that they're very hard to press. The back also pops off into two pieces, one giving access to the full-size SIM card slot and the other to the battery and Micro SD card slot. Unfortunately the Tablet P lacks the IR transmitter found on the Tablet S, as well as the cool companion remote app.
The Tablet P is well-built and sturdy, with nice materials and a very reliable hinge — its ability to stand one screen vertically while the bottom lays flat is pretty awesome, allowing you to prop the device at almost any angle and see it at your desk, or use it as an alarm clock on your bedside tablet.
Each 5.5-inch display is a 1024 x 480 LCD, and they both look good, sharp with deep blacks and good contrast — Sony's TruBlack technology is at work here, and it makes the screens look great. Viewing angles are pretty bad, with colors washing out a bit once you get more than a little bit off-axis, and since the displays are usually at two different angles one screen is always going to be off-axis. There are also jaggies on text if you look hard enough, but in general the displays do fine. I don't love the displays' resolution, either, because it means videos have black borders on the right and left as you watch 16:9 video, but video still looks pretty good.
There's only one speaker on the Tablet P, spewing sound through a small slit on the left side of the device. It's really underwhelming: everything comes out muted and muffled, and even at max volume isn't very loud at all. I spent a lot of time holding the tablet up to my ear to try and hear it, even in relatively quiet situations.
The Tablet P's rear-facing 5-megapixel camera is functional, though it's far from a camera you'd want to use to preserve important memories. It's slow and produces soft, noisy photos, though it's not measurably worse than most other tablet cameras. It can also shoot 720p video, though it's not much to look at either.

The front-facing, 0.3-megapixel shooter, on the other hand, is comically awful. I can't remember the last time I saw a camera that let in so little light — unless you're basically pointing the camera at the sun, you're going to get impossibly dark photos. Don't even bother trying the front-facing camera, even for video chat.
The Tablet P is a "PlayStation Certified" device, indicated by the four-icon logo placed near the hinge. It's a nice bit of branding synergy for Sony — the Xperia S and other devices are similarly certified — and means you can play a tiny selection of original PSOne games, but in practice it's not at all exciting. Playing Crash Bandicoot is all well and good, and it's actually much better on the Tablet P than most: the bottom screen is devoted to the game's controls, which makes the on-screen d-pad and buttons easier to manipulate.
The 1GHz, dual-core Tegra 2 processor inside the Tablet P was for a time the standard Android tablet chip, and with good reason: even though it’s not exactly bleeding-edge anymore, it's extremely capable.

For the Tablet P to really work as more than just a console, Sony would also have to convince every developer in the Android Market to code a version of their app that makes sense on the dual-screened form factor — the apps that aren't optimized become a pretty poor experience thanks to the odd screen resolutions and the difficulty of accessing the top screen while holding the device. It would also need to drop the huge bezel and make the device easier to hold — it's nice and small when it's closed, but unwieldy when you flip it open. Add all that together, and the Sony Tablet P becomes a hard sell even for the biggest fans of the Nintendo DS form factor.