Gadgetory

Sonne came out the gate last year at MWC with their vision of a tablet one that we really liked and deemed one of the best of 2013 now with their latest offering Sony keeps things mostly as sleek as before but continues the evolution of the Xperia line hey it's Josh fer from Andhra Authority what's going on everybody and this is a Sony Xperia z2 tablet much like the name implies the Xperia Tablet is supposed to be much like its smartphone counterparts only much bigger you'll see this notion permeate throughout the review but first let's take a look at design in this 10-inch tablet you do get the black slate design in full effect with glass on the front and plastic on the back and the sizable bezel around the 10-inch screen does make this look a little bit like a picture frame of sorts but I like to think that it's more like a small Sony TV because it does pack quite a bit of that power screen nuts might think the bezels are too much but in reality they really help with the handling of the device as you are able to grip the tablet easily on all sides by resting your thumb in that space and it truly makes a difference and makes the bezel more welcome than shunned and if you look closely on the sides of the screens lower third you'll find the dual speaker setup always a welcome feature of a tablet experience one of the first things you'll notice once you get this tablet in your hands is how thin it is after all six point four millimeters is the measurements on the thickness and it makes this one of the thinnest and Nimbus tablets that you'll ever see out there and slab is really the idea that I get here as you're going to wonder how something so compact in its thickness can provide so much power the signature silver power button and volume rockers are on the left complete with the stiff but meaty press to them a headphone jack is left on the lower panel while the top of the tablet houses an IR blaster along with a flap that gives access to microSD card slot and the micro USB charging ports and as you may already expect from experience devices these days those flaps mean that this tablet is rated for water and dust resistance helping the z2 tablet brave the elements users of the previous Xperia tablet Z will notice a better feel all around helped primarily by the fact that the skeleton has been smoothed out on the corners by the same plastic mixer that comprises the back this is a good change from the rigid corners of the original end does well to provide that much more comfort in usage finally on the back the material is of a plastic that is somewhere between hard and soft touch it has a little more to it than the soft touch found on the likes of say the Nexus 7 but it retains its propensity to get smudged handling is basically what you would expect from a 10-inch tablet but perhaps it's at its best in Sony's capable hands and that is because again I'll say the bezel around the screen you are able to grip the tablet pretty easily because there's a lot of real estate outside of the screen for you to rest your hand and then of course the actual thinness of the device provides a very nimble and light experience so you might find yourself throwing this tablet around like I've been doing already in this review just because you can and it feels comfortable and easy to do the display of the Xperia z2 tablet gets the same change as its smartphone counterpart mainly the move to an IPS matrix that helped the experienced you to get even better display quality along with better viewing angles you get the same advantages on this much larger screen with a resolution of 1920 by 1200 and a respectable pixel density of 224 pixels per inch now Sony's own enhancements of the live color LED which adds extra colors to the already established LCD color gamut along with the triluminos and then the ex reality for media viewing basically all of this means that you get a display with very deep contrast and great color production resulting in an experience that is quite cinematic in nature and if I may say very much what you think Sony would interpret media viewing and though the pixel density might be lower than found on certain competitors I found no reason to fault the reading experience here text is still very sharp and it's not hard to read at all so ultimately you'll be getting a lot of watching movies reading books or magazines and playing games on here and you'll have a great time doing any of those things which makes the z2 tablet a great media consumption device and all of that fun is accomplished with the help of a great processing package the kind of which are probably already expecting the Snapdragon 801 clocked in at 2.3 gigahertz backed by the audrina 330 and three gigabytes of RAM provide the sheer power you need to perform basically anything that the Android ecosystem has to offer and while the high resolution of the screen might be somewhat to blame for this I did see from time to time the slight stutter when moving between apps and even somewhat during basic tasks like swiping through home screens nothing that really broke my experience or make it tough to get what I needed done however and when gaming I saw no issues with pretty much any game that I played on here whether they were sprite based or 3d and multitasking takes on a pretty simplistic motif with the Xperia I and the recent apps button and perhaps with the small apps as well but the main takeaway here is that all of it works about as well as it should without any major hiccups of course which has always been the case with Xperia devices the marquee feature is the IP certification if you really need to watch that movie while enjoying a relaxing bath you can otherwise you can be as clumsy as you want to be with your beverages around this tablet and it will be fine now the bits and pieces that are found underneath the surface of the z2 tablet include that wide array of connectivity tools that you're probably used to already including NFC which you have the marker right there and you can pretty much say that Sony is the master of NFC at this point because they like to integrate it into pretty much every device these days you can even set up your Xperia z2 with the tablet to make it a real companion even screen mirroring is possible though the future I would probably use the most is the built-in network tether an IR blaster allows you to control your TV with the tablet's remote control app and after that you get the general slew of connections though my version is Wi-Fi only the dual front-facing speakers on the tablet are very much like the ones found on the smartphone counterparts they do get pretty loud the sound could use a little bit more richness but ultimately for a media consumption device like this tablet they are a very very welcome addition the sound experience can be catered to your liking with quite a few enhancements built into the sound settings menu they can bring up the sheer loudness or just the clarity of the audio quality I did like that the tablet is able to perform the same noise canceling as the smartphone but my unit did not come with the headphones that are needed for that to happen it's a bit of a shame but if you can get your own pair of those earbuds you'll get a wonderful audio experience that is very Sony like in quality battery life is supported by a lot of power saving features but also that's 6,000 milliamp hour unit within what kind of struck me the most about this tablet was well it's standby time I did use this tablet for a little while before I went off to Beijing the other week and when I returned what I had originally left at 30 percent battery life still had 20% left after 5 days and I was able to pick up the tablet and continue doing what I was doing on it five days before I went with one of my classic battery life tests here putting on my media consumption hat and watching two episodes of Top Gear which got the battery life down from 90 percent to 72 percent which I thought was pretty good you'll be able to watch a couple movies easily on here and still have more than half the battery life left over for browsing the web and getting any other tasks you need done now cameras on tablets are always a bit tough to give big recommendations to primarily because it's fairly obvious that you're not trying to buy a tablet solely for its camera capabilities and the lack of a flash diode someone tells the story of the camera experience as the optics are more of a required addition rather than a defining feature I will come in Sony for trying to outfit the app with quite a few features that you will find in the smartphone like the background defocus or the AR effect but without the quality to back them up they're just novelties and ultimately not very useful at all and also the 8 megapixel optics are plagued by a similar issue that you find on Xperia smartphones you can't use the full resolution if you want to be able to shoot at 16 by 9 at which point you will have to use 5 megapixels instead picture quality thus is passable at best you won't get anything from this camera that rivals the smartphone you already have in your pocket probably especially if it's the Xperia z2 the only application generally find for a tablet cameras is if you're just sitting back on your couch and you want to send a snapchat or share something that's maybe sitting on the table in front of you the experience software experience is largely what you may already be used to from other experiences this time just blown up for a tablet size what has always been at least to me a success of the Xperia UI is that well it doesn't really try too hard and like I always say when you keep it simple to keep it fast Sony's very stylized take on Android KitKat retains the rather simple home screen experience with the app drawer accessible from the top right allowing you a canvas that you can fill with icons and widgets galore get into the app drawer and you'll find a quick pull over from the left that allows you a few shortcuts and some customization options as is the case with most tablet interfaces you pull down on the left and get a look at your notifications and then on the right you can get the quick settings that are editable the recent apps screen houses the main edition of the small apps ultimately only sometimes useful overlays that go over your workspace for quick multitasking under the settings areas you are able to personalize the user interface using a number of different downloadable themes as you can see here with the spider-man theme that was free as some of them you have to pay for and even though the background that a number of system areas are changed like the bar on the bottom and the bar on top the icons remain the same so there's that and finally you have the different applications that Sony implanted into the tablet like the Walkman which is still one of my favorite looking local music players and I would use it all the time if my music wasn't already in the cloud the album and movies applications allow you a nice looking interface for your different pictures and videos and of course there is sony's own media market called unlimited and it has a stage along with the PlayStation mobile but honestly the both of them don't really offer anything more than stylized way of looking at content that may already be available on the Play Store once again Sony shows us that even though the things I it puts into its devices might not ultimately be useful for a number of people out there at least they don't come off as bloat and bog down the system which eventually mean that the Xperia UI is one of the better streamlined Android iterations out there so you can get the Sony Xperia z2 tablet for about $550 on online retailers and that is a premium price point but in a way you can argue that you get what you pay for because this is a pretty premium device from the build quality down to the software experience maybe - that camera there are some competitors out there like the Samsung Galaxy Tab pro 10 which provides a largely similar experience but has a higher resolution and of course Samsung's own version of Android so if you're going to pay the premium price for this tablet right here it's probably because of Sony's own style and you think that perhaps Sony rocks Android a little bit better and then of course there is the Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition but its main trump card is of course that s-pen if you really don't need a stylus experience or the multitasking that Samsung does put into its tablets well then you do still have one of the best media consumption devices here after all Sony style is really sometimes hard to deny and the Xperia z2 tablet does feel premium enough in a number of respects to multiply its higher cost Sony is entry into the tablet game started over a year ago but we're glad to see that they kept the best of the Xperia tablet Z and brought even more to offer in this second iteration as far as media consumption goes you can't really get any better than this tablet right here especially if you put down the extra money for those noise cancelling headphones that are compatible with it and when you hold the power of a small Sony TV in your hand with all of the power of the Xperia z2 smartphone you really do have something special and that is definitely what the z2 tablet feels like when you're just too busy having fun as always thank you guys very much for watching and I hope you enjoyed this review of the Sony Xperia z2 tablet so keep it tuned to android authority and watch all of the content from the likes of not just me but of course joe J's Kevin the tech ninja and also Len check out all of our footage on just pretty much everything Android we got stuff coming for you all the time and in the next few weeks you're going to see a lot of great content that I know that you guys have been waiting for so keep it tuned here hit that like button hit 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