Sony Tablet P Review

Of course, it would be great to have a full-sized tablet that can fit nicely in our pocket. The Tablet P is Sony’s first attempt in making a full sized tablet much more portable. It is integrated with the Sony Music Unlimited and Playstation certified. The Tablet P is a clamshell device and instead of a huge 10.1” display, it has dual 5.5” displays, each with 1024 x 480 pixels resolution. The tablet runs a modified version of Honeycomb (Android 3.2) with customized user interface. Between both screens there’s a thick bezel where nothing is displayed, which means you can’t watch a movie in one large screen. In Tablet P’s official webpage, you can find a few apps that can take advantage of the dual-screen configuration, although they work with varying degree of success. Some treat the dual-screen combo as one huge screen (with a thick black bar in the middle, of course) and others simply stretch. When playing Playstation games, the game is displayed on the upper screen and the virtual control is located at the bottom. The tablet comes with 36 pre-installed apps that are optimized for Tablet P. When you run standard Android apps, they either stretch or work only on one screen, leaving the other blank.

Your high hopes for the Tablet P to work as a highly portable gaming tablet may fall flat. Only a handful of titles have been optimized for the dual-screen configuration. The 5.5” displays just don’t cut it and visuals of Playstation games mostly don’t hold up. Each Playstation game is $6 a pop, which is too expensive for old games as paid games in Google Play are mostly less than $2.  Controls are spotty and the touchscreen gaming interface may be among the least accurate you may ever try.  The tablet is powered by the somewhat outdated 1GHz dual core Tegra 2 processor, which seems to struggle as it needs to handle two 5.5” screens simultaneously. The Tablet P has a slightly insane price of $550 off-contract and you may need to consider Samsung Galaxy Note (a phablet) instead, which is similarly pocketable and faster.