.::TeCh  PoRTaL::.

Another potential problem is that all pots and slots are sealed by plastic flaps, which means you have to open and close a flap every time you plug in a cable or want to change a card.

There are two exposed pogo pins that can be used to charge the tablet with the special Tablet Z cradle, so you can at least save yourself the trouble of undoing the microUSB port flap every time you need to charge the thing. But the cradle costs extra, of course.

Those flaps are, of course, mandated by the IP57 certification, which protects the Sony Xperia Tablet Z against dust and water (water jets or submersion up to 1m for half an hour).

It's great to see that Sony kept all ports and slots standard and fairly easy to access (you don't need a special tool to access the microSIM card slot), despite the extra hassle of having to waterproof them.

Also, not using a proprietary port like Apple or Samsung (or even Sony itself with the Xperia Tablet S) is handy too, you can have only one charger or one MHL adapter to use with the tablet and a phone.

Display

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z uses a TFT display of WUXGA resolution (1920 x 1200) covered by shatter-proof glass (the supplier is undisclosed). The Tablet Z uses what Sony eagerly calls an OptiContrast design, which means there's no air gap between the glass and the display panel and the touch sensor has been integrated into the display panel itself.

Having no air gap reduces glare from bright sunlight and also makes the display assembly thinner. Sony also says this makes the display appear black when the screen is turned off (it is a lot darker than the Nexus 10 screen). Finally, the image on displays manufactured in this way appears to be closer to the glass surface adding for a more high-end look.

The Xperia Tablet Z has Sony's BRAVIA Engine 2, which constantly processes the screen's image feed to enhance contrast and make things look sharper, while reducing noise and enhancing color rendering. It can be turned off, but with BRAVIA Engine on images do look punchier.

The screen is reasonably sharp to begin with - at 224ppi, it's close to the 264ppi of the iPad 4. The Apple tablet does have a slight advantage in sharpness, but overall this is one of the better screens on an Android tablet (the Nexus 10 screen is sharper, 299ppi, but it has other issues).

Unlike Sony phones, viewing angles on the Xperia Tablet Z are very good with a minor contrast loss when viewed at an angle.

Contrast is good, though the brightness could have been higher, we usually kept the brightness slider towards the maximum. The display is fairly bright for a tablet screen, so it could be the brightness slider dimming it too quickly as you move it down.

Colors are vibrant, but our unit came with a fairly warm screen, which may not be to everyone's liking.

Display test	50% brightness			100% brightness
	Black, cd/m2	White, cd/m2	Contrast ratio	Black, cd/m2	White, cd/m2	Contrast ratio
Google Nexus 10	0.26	223	859	0.50	443	878
Sony Xperia Tablet Z	-	-	-	0.53	531	996
Sony Xperia Tablet S	0.35	334	947	0.67	526	783
Apple iPad mini	0.25	208	838	0.51	458	812
Apple iPad 3	0.21	167	809	0.6	477	779
Apple iPad 4	0.21	163	797	0.63	476	762
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7	0	200	∞	0	328	∞
Asus Google Nexus 7	0.25	244	954	0.36	327	908
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1	0.27	223	832	0.49	406	821
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1	0.31	257	826	0.55	502	915
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus	0.17	196	1141	0.34	424	1236

 

Despite the OptiContrast design of the display, it's still pretty reflective, resulting in less than perfect sunlight legibility. It's not as reflective as the Nexus 10's screen, but it isn't much better either.

Battery life

We ran two of our battery tests on the Sony Xperia Tablet Z (it doesn’t support voice calls) to find out how well the relatively small 6,000mAh battery holds up.

In the web browser test, the Tablet Z lasted a little over 7 hours, which is nearly two hours less than the Apple iPad mini. Keep in mind that the iPad mini has a much smaller screen, which reduces battery usage. Also, we do this test over Wi-Fi, if you use the Xperia Tablet Z on an LTE network the battery will be drained quicker.

The video playback time is nearly the same as the web browsing time. The Xperia Tablet Z is quite some distance behind the iPad mini, but again, on the Tablet Z you get to enjoy movies on a big WUXGA screen (so you can watch FullHD movies without upscaling).

The enhanced user interface looks mostly stock

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z runs Android 4.1.2 out of the box and features the latest version of Sony's modifications. They are mostly the same as the ones that the Tablet S got, though the multi-user support was dropped (it was a nice feature to have, and it's a native feature of Android 4.2).

Before we go on, here's a short video walkthrough of some of the more interesting features of Sony's new tablet.

The lockscreen is the same as the one on the new Xperia phones. It's unlocked by a swipe up and there are two shortcuts - the camera and the music controls. We would have liked to see some more shortcuts here, two is okay (ish) on a phone, but they feel pretty lonely on a big 10.1" screen.

The homescreen can fool you for a second that you're looking at stock Jelly Bean, but then you start spotting the differences.

The bottom row is dedicated to the on-screen buttons - Back, Home and App switcher - and status (time, battery charge, signal strength and icons for notification). You can tap the status area to bring up notification area, another tap brings up toggles (Airplane mode, Auto-rotate screen and Notification toggles and shortcuts to the Wi-Fi and general settings).

In between the on-screen buttons and status are two buttons for the Small apps. The first brings up a list of Small apps (those can be filtered: All, Starred, Apps, Widgets), while the second one is a shortcut for an app of your choosing.

Walkman music player with plenty of enhancements

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z uses a Walkman-branded music player app. The interface is dead simple - you get album art on the left/top (in landscape/portrait orientation) that you can swipe to move between songs and playback controls on the right/below.

Songs can be starred to mark as favorite in your music library and can be liked on Facebook. You can use the infinite button to look up a song on YouTube (for the music video or a karaoke version), search for lyrics or find info about the artist on Wikipedia.

There's a visualizer option, which offers 8 different themes that animate along with the song. You might need to download music info for the visualizer to work better.

The app has two tabs - Playing and My Music. The first tab holds the now playing interface, while the other browses your local music library along with DLNA-compatible music sources. You can use the Throw feature to push a song to a DLNA-enabled player.

Audio quality is good but not the best

The Sony Xperia Xperia Tablet Z did quite well in the first part of audio output test. It wasn't the loudest device we have, particularly in the slate category, but its scores were excellent. Volume levels aren't bad, but they could have been better.

The Sony tablet didn't manage to impress quite as much when we plugged in a pair of headphones. The stereo crosstalk increased quite a lot and some distortion crept in. Frequency response was also affected, although it remained pretty good. Nonetheless, these are more issues than we are used to seeing on tablets, and when you consider that the volume level is only average, we can only give a passable mark to the Xperia Tablet Z in this scenario.

Check out the table and see for yourself.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Sony Xperia Tablet Z	+0.11, -0.10	-87.0	89.2	0.033	0.030	-87.8
Sony Xperia Tablet Z (headphones attached)	+0.21, -0.36	-86.6	88.8	0.114	0.233	-45.4
Apple iPad 4	+0.04, -0.00	-85.7	85.7	0.0019	0.0017	-85.2
Apple iPad 4 (headphones attached)	+0.00, -0.07	-85.7	85.6	0.0027	0.093	-81.0
Google Nexus 10	+0.03, -0.04	-82.3	82.2	0.011	0.022	-81.4
Google Nexus 10 (headphones attached)	+0.09, -0.24	-82.7	82.7	0.067	0.204	-77.9

 

 

Average 8MP camera

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z packs an 8MP main camera that can capture photos with a maximum resolution of 3248 x 2432 and a 2.2MP front-facing camera.

Sony put on a custom camera interface similar to that of the Xperia Z phone. One thing we don't like about it is how controls are placed on the left and right column - that may be okay on a phone, but on a 10.1" screen it is a pain to use.

As for the features, you get standard options like switching between the front and back camera, digital zoom, geo-tagging, exposure compensation and white balance. There's also a sweep panorama mode. Other things you can adjust are white balance, ISO, metering and exposure compensation.

Autofocus can be set to touch focus, single or multi autofocus, face detection (with optional smile shutter) and object tracking, which keeps the focus on the subject even if it moves. You can pick between several scene presets and color effects.

If you're not familiar with these technical terms, you can just enable Superior Auto, which automatically recognizes the type of shot you're doing and picks the best settings. It displays its guess so you can make sure it is correct. Superior Auto supports anything from landscape photos to pics of newborns.

There's also an HDR mode and a Burst shot mode. Both Superior Auto and HDR reduce the maximum resolution to 7MP, while Burst shots go only as high as 5.4MP (or lower, depending on the burst speed).

Photos can be auto-uploaded to PlayMemories with settings to do it only over Wi-Fi and only while charging.

The image quality of the 8MP camera is not the best, but it's close to the Xperia SP camera. There's heavy noise reduction, which kills a lot of the fine detail and there's still noise left over in the images. Colors are not very accurate and depending on the scene, Superior Auto can produce oversaturated colors.

Also note that Superior Auto sometimes (but not always) reduces the maximum resolution to 7MP.

Image quality comparison

The 8MP camera of the Sony Xperia Tablet Z gets into the fray in our Photo Quality Compare tool, which is mostly populated by phones rather than tablets.

1080p video camera

The both cameras on the Xperia Tablet Z can record FullHD videos.

The interface is identical to that of the still camera and you have access to most of the same features- touch focus is gone (but tracking autofocus is still available), scenes and geo-tagging, and manual image settings.

The videos are stored in MP4 files with around 17Mbps bitrate for the 1080p clips (almost the same bitrate as the one that Xperia phones use). Audio is stereo at 48kHz and 128Kbps.

Quality is not stellar but pretty good overall. There's enough fine detail and no visible noise or other image artifacts. Colors are once again not accurate and the contrast is low. On the up side, the camera hits a solid 30fps framerate.

Some pre-installed applications, big and Small

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z came with the Facebook app, but the Socialife app can handle your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts all at once. You can browse the combined stream of updates or by service.

The "You might like" option finds news items that it thinks you would be interested in, while Most popular pulls the hottest articles at the moment.

Individual posts can be shared and starred and along with other actions supported by the service, e.g. like and comment on Facebook, reply or retweet on Twitter.

The Small apps have a couple of functions that aim to rival the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. The first one is called Clip Manager- it snaps a screenshot and lets scribble notes on top with several colors and an adjustable brush size. You can tag the result to help find it easier later or share it.Then there's the simpler Notes Small app, which lets you quickly type in a note. That has no fancy drawing functions, you can use the full Notes app for that instead. That one lets you change font size, color and style, add checkboxes to items plus add multimedia like pictures, sounds, clips and even a map.There's also a file transfer app, which allows you to easily transfer files between the built-in memory and the SD card or even attached mass storage devices. It's not a full-blown file manager though.

Final words

After blowing hot and cold with unorthodox designs, Sony seem to have finally nailed their tablet styling. The Xperia Tablet Z combines stay-at-home comfort with on-the-go usability.

It can be the heart of your media hub with One-touch mirroring, an IR remote and DLNA functionality, or you could use it on outings and by the pool. You wouldn't even need to pack an extra charger and cable for it.

The Xperia Tablet Z is also one of the hottest pieces of hardware we've handled recently - thin and light, with great looks and some of that good old Sony premium feel. Desirable hardware has taken a back seat to desirable features in recent years and we're glad to see the Tablet Z buck the trend.

The Google Nexus 10 is the gold standard for 10.1" Android tablets when it comes to bang for your buck. It has a higher resolution screen and a bigger battery compared to the Tablet Z, not to mention that it will get new Android versions quicker.

The exterior isn't quite as polished though (nor is the Google tablet water resistant) and there's no expandable storage or LTE option. For the price (if you can get it from the Play Store), it's an amazing tablet still.

And you won't find a tablet quite as thin and light and, however subjective that is, as good-looking as the Sony Xperia Tablet Z. The specs are great too, our only real complaint is that the battery capacity is on the low side.

Sony has one of the best Android tablets on its hands, one with a unique feature mix that competing tablets have no answer to. While the company has some way to go in the hotly-disputed smartphone market, the Sony Xperia Tablet Z has a good chance of actually making a difference in the high-end segment of the tablet warfare.