Taking its time
Sony has received some criticism for being so late to the tablet party but, given how other non-Apple entrants to that market have fared (ahem, HP), it's hard to fault the consumer electronics giant for waiting until it felt it had something worth launching.
But with a year and a half to think about it, we think Sony might have come up with a better name than ‘Sony Tablet'. Nonetheless, that's what it has stuck with, and the two distinct models are given the postscripts ‘S' and ‘P'.
The basic hardware designs don't seem to have changed since Sony first teased these products back in April. Both use NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC, with ‘S' being the 9.4 inch screen version and ‘P' being the twin 5.5 inch screen version. The Wi-Fi-only version of the ‘S' will be available at the end of September, with the 16GB one costing $500 and double the storage for an extra hundred bucks.
The ‘P' will only come in a 3G variety and, together with the 3G version of the ‘S', we'll have to wait until November to get some of that action. No pricing has been revealed for these, but typically the addition of 3G has cost around $130 in other tablets. The Wi-Fi-only versions will come with Android 3.1, while the 3G ones will be Android 3.2.
They will all, of course, come with as many bits of unique Sony software and services as it can cram in, including touch-screen technologies, Sony cloud entertainment services, PlayStation gaming, and cross-device connectivity with other Sony and DLNA devices.
