Skip to main content

Hands-on: Sony’s Xperia Tablet Z could be the first Sony tablet worth owning

MWC 2025
Read our complete coverage of Mobile World Congress
 

Check out our review of the Sony Xperia Tablet Z.

Recommended Videos

The Xperia Tablet Z didn’t make its debut here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, its presence is a good indication that the tablet will be launched all over the world in the next few months. Sony has struggled with tablets in the past, coming up with unusual, and strange designs to try and tempt the crowds away from Apple and Samsung’s offerings; but with the Xperia Tablet Z, it has abandoned the gimmicks and gone for flat out style instead.

Sony Xperia Tablet Z
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Xperia Z smartphone impressed us with its cool simplicity, and Sony has repeated this with the Xperia Tablet Z. Never has the word slate been more appropriate; not only is the Tablet Z dark and slim, but it’s also angled and sharp where other tablets are usually curvy. It’s a striking look, enhanced by the tablet’s low 495g weight. Despite the lack of smooth edges, it’s comfortable to hold in one hand.

Sony showed the black model at Mobile World Congress, and it has chosen a matte, soft rear panel that looks great against the deep, shiny black of the 10.1-inch screen and its bezel. It’s easily the best looking tablet Sony has made, and it’s astonishingly thin at just 6.9mm, a figure which almost certainly beats the smartphone in your pocket. It’s the perfect companion device to the Xperia Z, and it’s good to see Sony come up with a great design it feels comfortable extending throughout its top-of-the-range hardware.

IMG_0003
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is installed and although Sony says it hasn’t toyed around with the Android operating system too much, it’s still very much a Sony product rather than a Google one. As is often the case, this is both positive and negative. On the positive side, the photo gallery is great and encourages you to store your picture collection on the tablet. The pinch-to-zoom feature is intuitive and fun – thumbnails get larger or smaller as you pinch in and out – and is also useful for those of use with hundreds of images, particularly if they’re unsorted. The user interface (UI) is less successful if you’re used to Google Nexus devices; Sony has moved a few buttons around and it can be frustrating to search for them until you’re familiar with its nuances.

Back to the positives: The NFC pairing worked instantly with a Sony speaker (tap your tablet to the speaker to connect). The shortcuts at the bottom of the screen concentrate on features such as Sony’s customized gallery and the media player. For a tablet running Android 4.1 and using a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro with 2GB of RAM, the Xperia Tablet Z wasn’t as smooth we hoped, but its hiccups were relatively rare.

Sony Xperia Tablet Z menu
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Although we couldn’t personally test it in our short hands-on with the Xperia Tablet Z, Sony claims that, like the Xperia Z phone, the tablet is water proof. It went so far as to show another test tablet being repeatedly dunked into a bowl of liquid to prove it could take the hydration. One of the other tablets announced at MWC, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0, had a slow-witted camera, but the Xperia Tablet Z was quick to focus and take a picture. The results looked good on the tablet’s screen, although we were taking them in a brightly lit environment. It does use the Exmor R sensor seen in the Xperia Z and other Sony smartphones, so performance should be consistent.

Sony’s ace card is the Xperia Tablet Z’s design and construction, as embodies that premium feel Sony has long been associated with, but failed to capitalize on in recent years. Sony products rarely come cheap, and we don’t expect the Tablet Z to break that tradition. However, with this and the equally desirable Xperia Z smartphone on its books, 2013 could indeed be Sony’s breakthrough year for mobile, just as Sony’s Corporate Vice President Kaz Tajima promised at the Tablet Z’s unveiling. It’s expected to go on sale in the spring.

Andy Boxall
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
Sony Xperia 5 III is a $1,000 flagship in 2022 with hardware from 2021
sony xperia 5 iii

Sony is finally bringing the Xperia 5 III to the U.S. market, eight months after the phone was officially introduced to the world. Sony phones and delayed releases have been somewhat of a recurring theme lately. The $2,500 Xperia Pro 5G was launched in February of 2020 but only arrived in January of 2021. The Xperia 1 II flagship also took a few sweet quarters before making it stateside.

The latest case of a delayed Sony phone is the Xperia 5 III. It’s not a bad phone. Actually, far from it. It just doesn’t belong to the year 2022, especially with that handsome $1,000 asking price. It will be available unlocked from authorized retail partners, but only in its Frosted Black trim. If you’re eyeing the stunning green color, only the official Sony online store has it.

Read more
Sony’s $1,800 Xperia Pro-I phone shares features with RX100 VII compact camera
Xperia Pro-I phone

The Sony Xperia Pro-I is the latest smartphone from the company for the camera-features-focused niche Pro audience. The $1,800 phone sports a 1-inch stacked CMOS sensor with built-in memory and phase-detection autofocus. It is the same as the one inside Sony's RX100 VII compact camera which we proclaimed one of the best point-and-shoot cameras in our review. The smartphone comes with a dedicated shutter button on the right edge, and Zeiss Tessar calibrated optics.

In the name Xperia Pro-I, the "I" stands for Imaging. It features a 6.5-inch 4K HDR (3840 x 1644 pixels) OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, 240Hz touch sampling rate, a 21:9 aspect ratio, and 100% DCI-P3 color gamut. It is powered by the Snapdragon 888 chipset, paired with 12GB RAM and 512GB storage, which is expandable up to 1TB. It packs a 4,500mAh battery with support for 30W fast charging.

Read more
The Sony Xperia 1 III has a 4K display and a variable telephoto camera
sony xperia 1 iii 5 news

Sony is revamping its top-end phones. The company has announced all-new Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 models, and they offer some pretty stellar features that should appeal to longtime Sony mobile fans.

The Xperia 1 III is the flagship device among the two, but the Xperia 5 III closely follows it in terms of overall features and experience. Neither of the two devices offers a radical new design, and you'll immediately recognize them if you've seen a Sony phone before. But they do offer some fancy new features that you might appreciate.

Read more