Last week Sony announced their entrance in the tablet world with two uniquely designed tablets S1 and S2. Of course these tablets will run with Android 3.0 Honeycomb as rumored in the February.
The S1 is designed as a magazine and really feels like a magazine when you hold it and the S2 is a dual screen tablet which makes it easy to carry in your pocket. Yes, this is the feature which you were looking for so long, a really portable tablet!
The S1 has a 9.4-inch display which has lots of uses: this tablet is not equally thick in all areas. Rather it is thicker at the upper side and it is gradually thinned towards the bottom. That’s why it’s called the magazine style, it’s really easy to hold and has a better grip than other tablets in the market. Sony promised that these tablets will be lighter too.
The S2 has two 5.5-inch displays which can be folded to fit perfectly in your jacket pocket. This new form factor of this tablet might seem like a bold step for Sony, but after looking at the features you may also be interested to buy one of these. The dual screen combo can be used for various purposes: you can watch video on one display and browse the Internet on the other or you can view your inbox in one display and each mail you select will be displayed in the other display. These remind us of the Acer Iconia dual screen laptops though we expect something better from this one as its OS is for touch based devices.
There is another great use of the second display too as both tablets are PlayStation certified and you will be able to play the PlayStation games similar to the Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play. As both S1 and S2 do not have buttons you will be playing with virtual buttons on the touch screen, but on S2 you will be getting the best experience as you will be getting one display for game and other for the controller. This is the feeling that no other tablet form factor can give you for playing games.
At both tablets, Android Honeycomb OS is heavily modified with a good use of tiles and resembles these with Windows Phone 7 devices. Unsurprisingly these tablets will support Sony’s entertainment network Qriocity giving the users access to a huge number of digital contents. The tablets will feature both 3G/4G and Wi-Fi connectivity and will also have a good communication with the entertainment devices as these will have integrated IR ports(which will enable these to be used as remote controllers for various devices including Bravia from Sony). S1 and S2 will also feature DLNA, so you will be able to ‘throw’ your downloaded digital contents from Sony premium networks to other big displays like HDTVs. The keyboard is also good and finely optimized for bigger screens and the eBook reader app is also designed to be exactly book-like with the folding mechanism included.
Exact date of release and prices are both unknown till now, but S1 and S2 both will be available sometime in the fall 2011 and the prices are leaked, which, according to Engadget, $599 for the S1 and $699 for the S2.
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