Consumers have a lot of choices when it comes to tablets these days. There’s the iPad 2, of course, but you’ve also got an assortment of Android tablets, in addition to cheaper alternatives like the Kindle Fire. In the world of Honeycomb tablets, though, it can sometimes be difficult to really differentiate between the different offerings. Sony is certainly giving it a try.

You might remember when we first previewed the Sony Tablet S and now we’ve got our hands on one for a more comprehensive review. How different is it compared to all the other Honeycomb tablets that are already out there? What sets it apart from the pack that would make you choose it over the others? Read on to find out.

Features at a Glance

On paper, the Sony Tablet S is going to sound a lot like the competitors. It gets its power from the standard NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, backed by 1GB of RAM and your choice of 16GB or 32GB of internal storage. They’ve opted for a somewhat nonstandard 9.4-inch touchscreen, but most people will just place this in the same bin as the 10-inchers. One big differentiating feature is the inclusion of a full size SD card slot, whereas many other tablets go with microSD. That’s great for travel when you might take the photos from your camera and plunk the SD card in here for a bigger viewing experience.

Here’s a quick overview video that I put together that better illustrates some of these features.

The 5MP rear camera and VGA front camera do the job that they need to do, but they’re far from being the top of the league. Rounding out the specs are the usual array of WiFi, Bluetooth, microUSB and Flash support. There’s also infrared support, so you can control all of your home theater equipment with the right apps too.

The Folded Magazine Design

Another big way that Sony is trying to separate its Tablet S from the rest of the pack is with the physical design. Instead of going with a regular flat slate, the Tablet S has a unique “folded” design that is meant to mirror what you get when you open a page of a magazine and fold it over. This makes for a wedge-like profile.

In some ways, this works, since it creates a slight angle when you place the tablet on a flat surface. It also creates these indented grooves on the sides, so the buttons are less likely to be pressed accidentally. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily superior to the more conventional flat sides, but it does make the experience just a little different.

Everyday Performance and Benchmarks

Using the Sony Tablet S as an everyday device, I don’t have a lot in terms of deal-breaking complaints. Flipping between the different home screens and quickly scrolling through webpages isn’t quite as snappy as it could be, but it’s not so painfully slow as to render it frustrating. I tried a variety of media streaming apps, games, and so on to see how it stood up and the Tablet S is perfectly suitable.

In running it through the Quadrant Standard benchmark, though, I found that most of the scores ranged from about 1,550 to 1,750 or so. This isn’t so painfully useless, but it is toward the lower end of the spectrum. This is the same range as the Motorola Xoom, but a fair bit behind the 2100 range that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is able to achieve.

It’s possible that the ICS update could help this, but that’s all really conjecture at this point.

It’s a PlayStation Tablet…

Just like the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone, the Tablet S comes with PlayStation certification. In the grand scheme of things, this really won’t make that much of a difference to most tablet users, but it does mean that this tablet is somewhat optimized for the Sony mobile gamer. And yes, I know that Angry Birds Seasons isn’t a PlayStation game.

Conclusion

What makes you special? It’s the question that we ask of just about every tablet that we see, since they’re all so similar. They come with different sized screens, but the processing power is roughly similar, as are battery life and general daily performance. You are stuck with a proprietary charging port, complete with a power supply brick, but most other Android tablets don’t charge over USB either. I do like the full size SD card slot, though, and the “folded” wedge design is growing on me.

The recent price cut might help a little, but just about every other manufacturer of Honeycomb tablets is doing much the same thing. At the end of the day, the Sony Tablet S is perfectly adequate, but it’s also not terribly special either.

The post Review: The Sony Android Tablet S appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Are you digging the 10-inch variation on Samsung’s Android tablet, but you wish it had some faster wireless connection options? Wish no more, because the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with 4G is going to start arriving in stores on July 28. That’s tomorrow, in case you didn’t want to check your calendar.

Eric Franklin of CNET argued that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the best Android-based tablet on the market, ousting heavy competition like the Motorola XOOM and Asus Eee Pad Transformer. As a quick refresher, it gets the same 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra2 processor as its competitors, as well as the 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. The 4G model comes in your choice of Metallic Gray or Glossy White.

Preorders for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 4G already started last month with Verizon, so there’s no saying whether you’ll be able to just waltz into your local VZW dealer tomorrow to get one. The 16GB and 32GB models are $529.99 and $629.99 respectively, with 4G LTE plans starting at $30 per month for 2GB of bandwidth. At LTE speeds, you’ll likely rifle through that faster than you can say Honeycomb delight.

The post 4G-equipped Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 ships Thursday appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

A friend of mine recently expressed a great deal of interest in the Toshiba Thrive tablet. I took a look at the spec sheet and I didn’t see a heck of a lot that made it better (or worse) than the competition. Then, I saw the initial pricing of $599 and got turned off. As it turns out, the Thrive can be cheaper.

Powered by Android 3.1 Honeycomb, the Toshiba Thrive is currently being offered for pre-order through Future Shop. If you go all the way down to the 8GB model, this Android tablet can be yours for $429. The 16GB and 32GB variants are being pegged at $479 and $579, respectively. All of them are expected to ship starting August 12th.

Yes, that’s cheaper than the price points that were originally rumored, but it still doesn’t beat the Asus Eee Pad Transformer for value. That’s still selling at $399 for the 16GB model and Asus really didn’t cheap out on build quality or materials. For now, that’s the benchmark, seeing how just about all these tablets are doing 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra2 and dual cameras. The one selling point that differentiates the Thrive from the rest? You can swap the back cover for different colors, including Blue Moon, Raspberry Fusion, Lavender Bliss, Silvery Sky and Green Apple. Tasty? Personally, I’m more interested in the SD Card slot, plus Mini-USB, USB, and HDMI ports.

The post Toshiba Thrive Android 3.1 tablet cheaper than expected appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It’s not enough just to have a 1GHz processor anymore. The new name of the smartphone game is dual core processing, so how does the recently revealed HTC Sensation 4G hold up against the other dual core competitors?

Engadget has put together a handy chart that pits the Sensation, spec for spec, against other Android phones that are very muc like it. Among the comparison are the Samsung Galaxy S II, Motorola Atrix 4G, LG Optimus 2X, HTC Evo 3D, Motorola Droid Bionic, and LG Optimus 3D.

Aside from sharing the highest resolution screen with the Evo 3D, Droid Bionic, and Atrix 4G, the Sensation doesn’t really have a lot that sets it apart. It’s not the thinnest or the lightest (that goes to the Galaxy S II), it doesn’t have the most RAM, it doesn’t have the most storage, and it doesn’t have the fastest 4G speeds.

On the bright side, it comes with Gingerbread 2.3 out of the box, an 8MP camera, and an extra speedy 1.2GHz Qualcomm MSM8260 processor. Of course, specs are just specs, so we’ll have to see how it really stacks up against the rest in the real world. After all, the mere 800MHz (single core) processor in the Desire Z was able to outperform many of its 1GHz brethren.

[Read]

Click to know more about the new Droid Incredible 2 from Lets Talk.

The post How Does the Dual Core HTC Sensation 4G Stack Up? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Not satisfied with the overwhelming onslaught of tablets revealed at CES last month? Well, you’re in luck. They’re still coming by the truckload. The newest in the bunch is the Acer ICONIA TAB A500.

The 10.1-inch tablet comes powered by the same Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS that you find on competitors like the Motorola Xoom, except this version gets “combined with Acer UI to reach a whole new level of interactivity.” Everyone’s rocking their own skins these days, eh?

They’re promising console-quality gaming with the NVIDIA GeForce GPU and NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor. There’s support for 1080p HD video playback, Acer’s clear.fi media sharing system, WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth 2.1, and gyrometer-oriented controls.

It’ll be really interesting to see how all these Honeycomb tabs match up against the iPad 2, seeing how we have nothing confirmed for Cupertino’s second outing. The ICONIA TAB A500 (damn you, all-caps brand names!) ships this April at a price yet to be determined.

The post Acer Does Honeycomb Too With ICONIA TAB A500 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It’s one thing to come forward with a spec sheet that should leave users in awe. It’s another thing altogether to have a product that people will actually want, admire, and use in the long run. Apparently, the G-Slate from LG falls short in that regard.

Kat Hannaford had the opportunity to go hands-on with the G-Slate (known as the Optimus Pad on the other side of the pond). The specs were impressive, to be sure, but she was left feeling “kinda chilly.” The 3D camera and display are to be applauded for their innovation and boldness, but it’s little more than a novelty at this point.

The anaglyphic 3D is a pretty funky feature, but personally I can’t imagine using it. It’s not like I have a 3DTV and would only shoot stereoscopic video at 720p—because I don’t—but imagine yourself in day-to-day life, viewing your home videos wearing red and cyan glasses. You’d maybe show your friends once or two, for kicks, but that’d be it.

It’s not that the G-Slate is a bad tablet — Kat says the build quality is quite a bit better than LG products of the past — it just lacks that X factor makes you feel that “I have to have it now” kind of feeling. What do you think? Is a 3D display a winning feature for you? Or are you satisfied with just having a smartphone pull your mobile duties?

The post LG G-Slate Tablet Not What It’s Cracked Up To Be appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Remember when the first 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chips hit the scene and we amazed by having a “G” in the mobile CPU’s clock speed? And now NVIDIA Tegra2 is winning many hearts with its dual core wonders? Not to be outdone, the upcoming TI OMAP5 chips are going to boast four cores of processing.

“But the NVIDIA Tegra3 beat them to the punch!

True. The Tegra3 will do the quad-core thing, but “only” at up to 1.5GHz. The new OMAP5 platform will offer four cores going nutso at up to 2GHz. That’s supposed to offer up to 3x the processing power of the OMAP4 (which will power the BlackBerry PlayBook) while improving power consumption by 60%.

What’s interesting is that the four cores aren’t the same. You get two ARM Cortex-A15 cores (up to 2GHz) and two ARM Cortex-M4 cores. Combined, OMAP5 is said to support up to three QSXGA (2560×2048) displays at the same time.

Sure, that all sounds good on paper, but will it work in practice? That’s the bad news. Samples aren’t going to get shipped out to manufacturers until late 2011 with actual OMAP5-powered devices following in mid-2012. By then, Tim might have already Franken-welded four Tegra2 chips together for more power. (Grunts notwithstanding.)

[PhoneScoop]

The post TI goes crazy, announces OMAP5 quad-core 2GHz mobile processors appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

But, how well does it actually perform? How is that Tegra2 processor holding up? Has Notion Ink fixed up some of the quirks that plagued earlier builds of the tablet? Well, Greg of NotionInkFan has posted several video walkthroughs with the device. He looks at Flash updates, UI concerns, GPS bugs, and all sorts of other things that you might want to know.

In addition to the two vids by Greg, there are two additional videos from other people in the Notion Ink community. What do you think? Will you choose Adam over, say, the $800 Motorola XOOM?

[NotionInkFan]

The post Extensive hands-on videos with Notion Ink Adam tablet appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

If you’re thinking that the Optimus Pad is sounding super familiar, there’s a reason: it’s basically the same as the T-Mobile G-Slate, though it’s unclear whether the international edition will ship with the same 4G connectivity as its USA-bound variant.

The rest of the specs, though, are assumed to be the same. There’s an 8.9-inch (3D capable) touchscreen, NVIDIA Tegra2 processor, front-facing camera, 5MP rear camera, and 32GB of internal memory. Both the LG Optimus Pad and the T-Mobile G-Slate are expected to get 6400mAh batteries.

LG hasn’t indicated the street price for the Optimus Pad yet, but they might have that information at MWC in a couple of weeks. With so many Honeycomb tabs set to flood the market, what will the iPad 2 bring to the table to shift the attention back to Cupertino?

[UWV]

The post World version of T-Mobile G-Slate revealed as LG Optimus Pad appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Taking advantage of the T-Mobile HSPA+ 4G network are a new Android smartphone and, you guessed it, a new Google Android tablet too. First up, we have the Samsung Galaxy S 4G. If you were to place this new phone next to its Vibrant predecessor, you probably wouldn’t notice any major differences. It has the same 4-inch touchscreen, 1GHz Hummingbird processor, 5MP camera, and 16GB microSD card. The only real difference is the 4G ST-Ericsson radio found within, as well as the front-facing VGA cam and pre-loaded Inception.

On the tablet side of the equation, we get the T-Mobile G-Slate with Google by LG. This is rocking a 3D-capable 8.9″ capacitive touchscreen, but it’s not the glasses-free variety on the Optimus 3D; you need to use the pack-in glasses. As expected, it’s got Android 3.0 Honeycomb too, as well as dual cameras, Tegra2 processor, and 32GB on-board storage.

If you like Android and you like 4G, it looks like T-Mobile is a good bet. Then again, Verizon has quite a bit of 4G (albeit a different kind of 4G) and Android happiness going on too. So, the question remains, where’s the 4G-capable iPhone?

[Wired]

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