Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is the Sony Tablet P it's available from AT&T for $399 with a two-year contract or 549 without one when it's closed it kind of looks like a glasses case it's nice looking it's a little creaky the plastic on the front will you gave a little if you press it but for the most part it's well built it'll slide into a jacket pocket or even jeans if you wear baggy jeans and when you open it up there's two 5.5 inch displays inside each one is 1024 by 480 which is kind of an odd resolution and leads to some issues with software and apps they'll run with bezels on each side so you don't actually fill the screen even with videos which is a little fun the screens are good otherwise they're the blacks are super dark sony uses true black technology which works pretty well here it makes the screens look good the viewing angles are really bad though whites start to get really yellow as soon as you get off access and colors just don't look good it's got a really sturdy hinge which is nice and you can actually prop it up at almost any angle but it's got these enormous bezels on both sides it's actually over an inch on each side and it makes the device really hard to hold especially if you're trying to get at the top screen it's just kind of awkward to reach around all the time there's also a big bezel between the two screens so any app that you use that will go from one to the other it gets really broken up as you move between the two the bottoms of the device are also really sharp which means as you hold them as you hold the device it actually digs into your palms to the point where if you use it for more than a few minutes as you're reaching around it actually starts to hurt your hand there are ports on the right side there's a power button an AC adapter it actually won't charge by the USB port which is a shame so it has its own pretty big power adapter so there are two cameras on the tablet p5 megapixel shooter on the back which takes you know functional pictures in a pinch but it's not something you're gonna really want to use it also shoots 720p video and it's pretty much the same story it's decent if you really need to use it and it's all you have with you but this certainly isn't gonna replace your digital camera the front-facing camera on the other hand is really bad even by our low front facing camera standards the tablet P is running Android 3.2 point 1 and it has a lot of the same problems that every other honeycomb tablet does it's sluggish it points and there are some definite bugs Sony also customized basically everything about the operating system largely because they had to to get it to work on the 2 and some of the apps that they redesigned they'll actually work really well so since there's the two screens what they what Sony did a lot was put the app on the top screen and the keyboard on the bottom which is nice because it gives you a full screen for the keyboard without taking up a lot of what you'd want to see from the app they also designed it to fit with the screen resolution so you do get more of a full screen look from it so for some things where Sony managed to actually do some work in changing the apps it works really well in the two screens but with a lot of other things like Angry Birds where Sony doesn't really have any effect it just defaults it to the top screen and the bottom screen becomes basically useless for some apps you can expand them to show on both screens and but that's both as you can see really buggy and just looks pretty bad you'll get the catapult for Angry Birds like right here in the middle where it just becomes impossible to use for a couple of the games that they've been able to change like Crash Bandicoot which is part of Sony's PlayStation Store this is a PlayStation Certified device now you actually get the controls down in the bottom screen in the game up here again it's a weird resolution for the game so you get a lot of blank space but it's cool to be able to use these controls to run around here in general the performance on the tablet is pretty solid it has a Tegra 2 processor which is a little outdated now but still works pretty well and for the most part it moves around quickly apps launch fast and there wasn't much delay other than the stuff we're used to from normal honeycomb devices the browser in particular is pretty solid most the Android browser typically has trouble with full sites like ours they're really image heavy but in this case it works relatively well pinching and zooming is a little buggy but smoother here than on most devices we've seen and the browser performance is definitely a strength despite the fact that it's really hard to see what's actually happening on a web page it connects to ATT HSPA+ network unfortunately not LTE but reception was pretty good the lack of LTE much like the Tegra 2 processor makes the tablet P feel like a device that was designed a year ago and then really hasn't been changed between then and now when it's finally being released the tablet P also has other problems there's a huge issue with the two displays Sony did as much as it could to optimize Android for two displays but a lot of things that just can't touch them a lot of apps just don't work well if you really want a portable gaming console you can get the Xperia Play or the PlayStation Vita both also on AT&T for cheaper than the tablet P and if you really just want a tablet that does games well you can get the iPad 2