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Sony Xperia Tablet S hands-on pictures and video

Sony Xperia Tablet S hands-on pictures and video

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Tablet s ifa
Tablet s ifa

Sony's new $399 Xperia Tablet S has the familiar "folded magazine" form factor as its previous tablet, but it's way thinner and fairly light. It's quite nice, actually. Performance was smooth in in the time we had it (which, admittedly, are ideal settings), and there's an interesting dongle to cover up the port for complete "splash-proof" protection — but thankfully that can be plugged in and still work with the various stands and docks. Sadly, the Tablet S is running Android 4.0 at this point — no hints of what Jelly Bean might look like on this — and the Remote Control app wasn't functional. A shame, too, since there are some pretty impressive-looking TVs just a few feet away.

We also got to spend some time with the $99 keyboard dock, which plugs into a dock connector port on the bottom of the tablet and provides pass-through power from a wall charger. The keys themselves are a capacitive, much like what Microsoft's Touch Cover for Surface, and the gaps in between are felt, so you can tell them apart just by touch. That said, typing fast was a little harder than you'd expect — there's no tactile sense of when you've hit the key enough. It seems like a little practice would improve things a lot, but we'll see when this thing ships next month.

Sony Xperia Tablet S hands-on pictures from IFA 2012

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Sony Tablet S keyboard case hands-on

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