The first thing you’ll notice with the Tablet S is its shape. Its wedge-shaped design is meant to mimic a magazine, bent at the fold, with one side thicker than the other.
When using the tablet in landscape mode, you hold the thinner side of the tablet at the bottom, with the thicker side at the top. Either way, holding the tablet by the thicker side in portrait mode in your right hand (or your left, leaving your right to tap the screen) or by the thinner end in landscape mode in both hands, is quite comfortable. The back is coated with a textured, smudge-resistant coating that also adds to the overall comfort of holding the tablet. In addition, the Tablet S has two little feet on the back, near the top (or thicker) edge, that elevate the rear of the tablet (in landscape mode), making it easier to see and use while lying flat on a desktop or other surface. Doing this with a flat tablet produces so much glare that you usually need to stand directly over the device to see the screen, so here, the wedge design is a definite winner.
Sony has done a good job squeezing a lot of tablet into a small, light package. It measures 9.5 inches long by 6.8 inches wide by 0.3 inches deep (at the thin end), and weighs only 1.3 pounds. Compared with most other tablets, the Tablet S has very few buttons and ports. In landscape mode, along the left edge are an audio jack, a Micro-USB port, and a full-size SD Card slot. You also get a Micro-USB–to–standard-USB adapter, which allows you to plug in a jump drive for additional storage or data transfer.
Along the right edge are the power button, a battery status light, volume controls, and a reset button. All other buttons, such as Back, Home and Keyboard, are onscreen icons that display in the lower-left corner. The power adapter is located on the upper-left, or thin edge, of the wedge shape so that it is positioned on the bottom-left in landscape mode.
This tablet has the obligatory two cameras—a 5-megapixel on the back for shooting pictures and movies, and a 0.3-megapixel (VGA) camera on the front for videoconferencing. We took several snapshots and short clips with the rear camera and got passable results—the ho-hum, okay-but-not-clear-enough pictures and movies we get from many tablets and smartphones. The front camera worked fine for videoconferencing, though.
As you'd expect from Sony, the 9.4-inch, 1,280x800-resolution, IPS (In-Plain Switching) LCD shows photographs and movies beautifully. The IPS technology, also used in Apple's iPads, makes for excellent viewing at any angle, and the TruBlack Technology coating, which Sony also uses in its digital photo frames, provides rich blacks and high contrast with reduced reflections. That said, the screen wasn’t very bright: We had to turn the brightness all the way up to get the best results. The iPad 2 and Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 screens are much brighter. Brightness aside, movies and photographs displayed as well or better than we've seen on most other tablets. And sound was also quite good—distinctively better than many notebooks we've seen with touted high-end sound systems.
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