This will be a long read with pictures (hopefully) and some anger, but I will try to keep it civil and explain everything from the start. There are multiple angles and aspects to my buying any expensive stuff, so there will be a lot of details in this thread. Those details are important to me.
I have been a Sony fan as long as I have had money to spend. Sony has the aesthetics and devices that I love, they keep missing most of the marks, but I have loved them none the less. I love their TVs, I have loved their consoles (though the PS Vita does not seem to be an instant winner). I have owned a large assortment of Sony gear, ranging from boomboxes and ear buds, down to seriously top of the line TVs and studio level headphones.
Prologue
Many years ago I bought a new generation Sony Walkman device. It was called he NW-A3000, it had a regular 20GB laptop HDD in it and it sucked major ass. Don't get me wrong, I loved it and I got my money's worth out of it, but it had serious issues. The battery life dwindled within the first 20 days (got reduced to maybe 20% of what it should have been, later on it refused to boot up without a power adapter). The software used to get music onto that device was the most god-awful punishment anyone should ever imagine (SonicStage). The hard drive eventually broke, but what broke even before that was Sony's support for the device. The worst menu errors were fixed with half-assed firmware updates, but shortly after that, the support was simply discontinued and Sony moved on to the next series of Walkman devices. I was angry, but that no longer matters. The lesson for me was clear: Sony makes good hardware, but their software side is as useful as a rabbit carcass for storing car parts. I switched to iPod nanos and have been with them ever since, going through three and a half generations now.
Buying the Sony Tablet
The first tablet I bought - not unlike so many others - was the iPad. The iPad is a great device, but at some stage I wanted to give it to my parents and replace it with something else. Since the iPad 2 really does not have any major advantages over its older brother (aside from the form factor and white color), I kept leaning toward an Android tablet. I had seen Android on some phones and I did not like it one bit. But this was not a phone, it was a tablet, and my expectations for the software were different. I scouted the Android tablet scene for a while and then realized that all of them look and feel horrible. Most devices still have fugly design and for some reason all of them need to have their manufacturer's logo on the bezel. Why? It looks retarded, I do not need to be reminded what Japanese company I am supporting when I grab the device. So for a while I kept looking. And then Sony came along with their two prototypes. At the expos they demonstrated the AMOLED screen, the DLNA support, throwing content to media devices and the PS games and the seemingly superior second generation Tegra processing. Of course, it took a whole lot of time until they actually started selling the device, but one day I walked into the store and here's how it went down.
I was greeted by a heavily tattooed sales person, probably a few years younger than myself. I said hello and said that I was interested in the Sony Tablet, but before committing to the purchase, I had a few questions. The sales person told me to ask away, I smiled and said that the questions might be a bit technical. He still told me to go ahead and so I asked him about the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade. When it was due, whether Sony has officially stated that their tablet is going to get the update and so on. The sales person apparently had no idea what an ice cream sandwich was, so he shrugged at me. I moved on to my next question. I asked whether the device (which has an integrated DLNA application, unlike iPad) is capable of playing various formats over the DLNA client. More precisely, whether the device supports the transcoding service performed by the PS3 Media Server application. The clerk claimed rather happily that yes, he has the device at home and it plays everything, high definition and whatnot. I was very glad to hear that, I tortured him with some more details about the thing, but since he stated that the device can do anything, probably even resurrect the dead (if I had asked that). I asked what the PlayStation games support for the thing was. He shrugged and told me that he has downloaded games using Bittorrent. Well, that's his choice. I was growing bored and so I said that I'd buy it. Then it turned out that they only had the single unit in the store (for display in a glass cupboard). It was used, of course, with fingerprints all over it, but since it had no visible scratches or other injuries, I agreed to buy it. I also bought the simple dock. I then remembered that there was supposed to be some kind of a campaign bonus, buying the Tablet during the specific weeks meant you also got the leather cover for free. The cover runs the buyer 79 so it was good value. The clerk looked sad when I asked him about it, but then brought me the cover as well. For a moment there it looked like he was hoping to score the cover off of my purchase for himself. I paid, wished the clerk happy holidays and left.
First boot and initial impressions
Got home, unpacked the device, cleaned it up so it looked like new and then powered it up. The battery was as dead as a dodo, so I stuck the thing into the dock (I will come back to the hardware side later on) and made myself a cup of coffee and waited. Once it had reached a charge, I powered it on and was not very surprised that the device had been configured and used beforehand. It had various random games and applications installed on it, plus someone's Gmail accounts, Facebook accounts, Twitter etc. The browser had been used to view various porn streaming sites, the mailbox was full of spam and the device was filled with awful music, leaving less than 800 MB of free space. I reviewed the stuff on the device, but since I am not a malevolent git, I then initiated the factory reset procedure. Which was a bitch to find, since the menus and settings of the damn thing made no sense at all. What I presume to be the default settings menu for an Android device is completely retarded, its breadcrumbs navigation is about as useful as a horse skeleton. Plus it is impossible to understand, what options can be interacted with and which not. Some just fucking light up when I touched them, making the feedback sound too, but nothing happened. Very poor design. After I had performed the factory reset, the thing booted for about 200 seconds. That is freaking long for a portable device. Eventually it was up and running again, and then I encountered the first appalling design flaw. You know how many user login menus have two fields - one for the user name, the other for the password? Yeah. Well, when I tap the username section, I get a virtual QWERTY keyboard. Looks nice, is very sensitive, works. Well, when I press the password field, suddenly the keyboard layout changes. I say suddenly, not instantly. The keyboard layout for the password also includes the keypad. But since it includes the keypad, the buttons all shift. And since the transition is not quick, I found myself typing incorrect passwords all the time. Yeah, that's a big fucking design flaw in my book. Either stick to one layout or have a toggle button somewhere where I can freaking find it. Since my home country was not on the menu, I selected UK as my home base. OK, moving on. The wifi connection wizard during the first boot run is a disgrace. The device is known for its shoddy wifi reception, but the menu was worse. Once I had configured my local wifi access point, I got no feedback whether it was working. It then turned out that it was not working, for what reason - I never found out. After entering the wifi key for about the fifth time, it suddenly connected and I could continue. Finally i found myself at the Android home screen. Boy, is this place busy or what? By default, I had multiple shortcuts on multiple screens. On one of the home spaces, I had a Hungarian help shortcut to Sony's support web page. Hungarian? What an odd choice, considering I selected UK as my home. I then started removing all of the shite that was cluttering my home screens. Once that was done, I still had approximately 9 interactable things on my screen. The applications menu is another disaster. Sony has his own aesthetics going on with their native applications and those icons clash with the others like crazy. The applications menu is also in constant motion, making it feel like you're either drunk or going blind. Oh well.
Normal use
My device was not free of most garbage, so I decided to check out the bundled applications that there were. The default Gmail application is nice, but slow. The default web browser is fine, but also slow as fuck. I found Sony's social feed application. When I was configuring my accounts for it, the application remembered an incorrect FB password and then it turned out I could not correct my typo (caused by that same keyboard switch bullshit). I then found the DLNA client. Well, guess what: IT PLAYS NOTHING. It does not even play MP3 unless it is in some kind of its default format. So all of my videos - inaccessible using this device. Then there is some kind of Sony's own Android application marketplace, but guess what - I cannot access it unless I have a UK IP address. Same goes for the Sony Reader application - this is the tool used to sell you books, to read those books and also to access your DropBox contents. But hey - if you are not in the UK, fuck off. Yes, you cannot even access your own Dropbox contents unless you are behind a UK IP. There are various other Sony applications, including a wifi checker application - which seems kind of redundant. The only useful one is the Remote Control, which allows the tablet to function as a universal remote. Which is cool, I must admit, but even here there are problems. First, it cannot function as a remote control for PS3 even though there is Bluetooth support. Second, using the application does not prevent the device from going to sleep. So when you want to increase the volume, you need to first press the unwieldy power button, unlock the device and then press the desired function. Stupid. There are other problems, like the incomprehensible Favorites menu that does... Well, there you go, I have no idea what it does or why I should be using it. Various functions are doubled, like the Sony Music Player and the Android Music Player. Both suck.
Then there are two games on the device by default. When I mean by default, I mean that you can download those two games. One is Crash Bandicoot, a known quantity to GAF, but the other is Pinball Heroes, a shoddy and cheap pinball game that looks worse than a 99 cent game from the iOS market. Another fail.
Hardware issues
So I finally thought to try out some music on the thing. How do you get music on the device? There is a special File Transfer application that should do that, but for that you need a connection cable. Not a regular mini-USB cable, instead its retarded half-sister, micro-USB. Is there one in the box? Fuck no. And I don't have one in the house either, not since I sold my HTC HD2. The other should be the SD memory card. Does it come with a SD memory card? Fuck no again.
A word on the overall design. It looks great, but the bezel is too thick. The folded design is both fine and then it is not. Holding it like a folded magazine feels great. But try to grab the other side: it almost breaks. The screen is the only thing that deserves praise. The charging connector is retarded in both its placement and design. It is a long, multiple connector design that just screams failure at you. The touch screen is so sensitive that a dust particle falling on it can serve as a button press. Breathing too hard on it also registers as a button press.
I was growing angry with the damn thing and I decided to check out that fancy leather cover. Well, guess what: in order to use the cover, you need to glue strips of Velcro onto the tablet. Velcro that you will not be able to remove too easily. And then when you have the Velcro, the device no longer fits into the dock and you need to use the separate cable to charge it. What a fucking design disaster.
Conclusion
The Sony Tablet is quite possibly my worst purchase in 2011. It is a device that has been designed to be crap. The software side is broken and unless they really make strides with ICS, I don't think it's going to get any better. There is no clear roadmap for the device. There is no clear roadmap for the PlayStation games either - basically the PS logo on the fucking tablet is just a cocktease. I don't have friends who'd want to buy this piece of horse shit from me, not even for a fraction of the price. As it stands now, I will probably throw this mangled turd out of my window.
TLDR: Sony Tablet is shit, Android is shit, sales people lie like fuck. Don't buy the Sony Tablet.
I have been a Sony fan as long as I have had money to spend. Sony has the aesthetics and devices that I love, they keep missing most of the marks, but I have loved them none the less. I love their TVs, I have loved their consoles (though the PS Vita does not seem to be an instant winner). I have owned a large assortment of Sony gear, ranging from boomboxes and ear buds, down to seriously top of the line TVs and studio level headphones.
Prologue
Many years ago I bought a new generation Sony Walkman device. It was called he NW-A3000, it had a regular 20GB laptop HDD in it and it sucked major ass. Don't get me wrong, I loved it and I got my money's worth out of it, but it had serious issues. The battery life dwindled within the first 20 days (got reduced to maybe 20% of what it should have been, later on it refused to boot up without a power adapter). The software used to get music onto that device was the most god-awful punishment anyone should ever imagine (SonicStage). The hard drive eventually broke, but what broke even before that was Sony's support for the device. The worst menu errors were fixed with half-assed firmware updates, but shortly after that, the support was simply discontinued and Sony moved on to the next series of Walkman devices. I was angry, but that no longer matters. The lesson for me was clear: Sony makes good hardware, but their software side is as useful as a rabbit carcass for storing car parts. I switched to iPod nanos and have been with them ever since, going through three and a half generations now.
Buying the Sony Tablet
The first tablet I bought - not unlike so many others - was the iPad. The iPad is a great device, but at some stage I wanted to give it to my parents and replace it with something else. Since the iPad 2 really does not have any major advantages over its older brother (aside from the form factor and white color), I kept leaning toward an Android tablet. I had seen Android on some phones and I did not like it one bit. But this was not a phone, it was a tablet, and my expectations for the software were different. I scouted the Android tablet scene for a while and then realized that all of them look and feel horrible. Most devices still have fugly design and for some reason all of them need to have their manufacturer's logo on the bezel. Why? It looks retarded, I do not need to be reminded what Japanese company I am supporting when I grab the device. So for a while I kept looking. And then Sony came along with their two prototypes. At the expos they demonstrated the AMOLED screen, the DLNA support, throwing content to media devices and the PS games and the seemingly superior second generation Tegra processing. Of course, it took a whole lot of time until they actually started selling the device, but one day I walked into the store and here's how it went down.
I was greeted by a heavily tattooed sales person, probably a few years younger than myself. I said hello and said that I was interested in the Sony Tablet, but before committing to the purchase, I had a few questions. The sales person told me to ask away, I smiled and said that the questions might be a bit technical. He still told me to go ahead and so I asked him about the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade. When it was due, whether Sony has officially stated that their tablet is going to get the update and so on. The sales person apparently had no idea what an ice cream sandwich was, so he shrugged at me. I moved on to my next question. I asked whether the device (which has an integrated DLNA application, unlike iPad) is capable of playing various formats over the DLNA client. More precisely, whether the device supports the transcoding service performed by the PS3 Media Server application. The clerk claimed rather happily that yes, he has the device at home and it plays everything, high definition and whatnot. I was very glad to hear that, I tortured him with some more details about the thing, but since he stated that the device can do anything, probably even resurrect the dead (if I had asked that). I asked what the PlayStation games support for the thing was. He shrugged and told me that he has downloaded games using Bittorrent. Well, that's his choice. I was growing bored and so I said that I'd buy it. Then it turned out that they only had the single unit in the store (for display in a glass cupboard). It was used, of course, with fingerprints all over it, but since it had no visible scratches or other injuries, I agreed to buy it. I also bought the simple dock. I then remembered that there was supposed to be some kind of a campaign bonus, buying the Tablet during the specific weeks meant you also got the leather cover for free. The cover runs the buyer 79 so it was good value. The clerk looked sad when I asked him about it, but then brought me the cover as well. For a moment there it looked like he was hoping to score the cover off of my purchase for himself. I paid, wished the clerk happy holidays and left.
First boot and initial impressions
Got home, unpacked the device, cleaned it up so it looked like new and then powered it up. The battery was as dead as a dodo, so I stuck the thing into the dock (I will come back to the hardware side later on) and made myself a cup of coffee and waited. Once it had reached a charge, I powered it on and was not very surprised that the device had been configured and used beforehand. It had various random games and applications installed on it, plus someone's Gmail accounts, Facebook accounts, Twitter etc. The browser had been used to view various porn streaming sites, the mailbox was full of spam and the device was filled with awful music, leaving less than 800 MB of free space. I reviewed the stuff on the device, but since I am not a malevolent git, I then initiated the factory reset procedure. Which was a bitch to find, since the menus and settings of the damn thing made no sense at all. What I presume to be the default settings menu for an Android device is completely retarded, its breadcrumbs navigation is about as useful as a horse skeleton. Plus it is impossible to understand, what options can be interacted with and which not. Some just fucking light up when I touched them, making the feedback sound too, but nothing happened. Very poor design. After I had performed the factory reset, the thing booted for about 200 seconds. That is freaking long for a portable device. Eventually it was up and running again, and then I encountered the first appalling design flaw. You know how many user login menus have two fields - one for the user name, the other for the password? Yeah. Well, when I tap the username section, I get a virtual QWERTY keyboard. Looks nice, is very sensitive, works. Well, when I press the password field, suddenly the keyboard layout changes. I say suddenly, not instantly. The keyboard layout for the password also includes the keypad. But since it includes the keypad, the buttons all shift. And since the transition is not quick, I found myself typing incorrect passwords all the time. Yeah, that's a big fucking design flaw in my book. Either stick to one layout or have a toggle button somewhere where I can freaking find it. Since my home country was not on the menu, I selected UK as my home base. OK, moving on. The wifi connection wizard during the first boot run is a disgrace. The device is known for its shoddy wifi reception, but the menu was worse. Once I had configured my local wifi access point, I got no feedback whether it was working. It then turned out that it was not working, for what reason - I never found out. After entering the wifi key for about the fifth time, it suddenly connected and I could continue. Finally i found myself at the Android home screen. Boy, is this place busy or what? By default, I had multiple shortcuts on multiple screens. On one of the home spaces, I had a Hungarian help shortcut to Sony's support web page. Hungarian? What an odd choice, considering I selected UK as my home. I then started removing all of the shite that was cluttering my home screens. Once that was done, I still had approximately 9 interactable things on my screen. The applications menu is another disaster. Sony has his own aesthetics going on with their native applications and those icons clash with the others like crazy. The applications menu is also in constant motion, making it feel like you're either drunk or going blind. Oh well.
Normal use
My device was not free of most garbage, so I decided to check out the bundled applications that there were. The default Gmail application is nice, but slow. The default web browser is fine, but also slow as fuck. I found Sony's social feed application. When I was configuring my accounts for it, the application remembered an incorrect FB password and then it turned out I could not correct my typo (caused by that same keyboard switch bullshit). I then found the DLNA client. Well, guess what: IT PLAYS NOTHING. It does not even play MP3 unless it is in some kind of its default format. So all of my videos - inaccessible using this device. Then there is some kind of Sony's own Android application marketplace, but guess what - I cannot access it unless I have a UK IP address. Same goes for the Sony Reader application - this is the tool used to sell you books, to read those books and also to access your DropBox contents. But hey - if you are not in the UK, fuck off. Yes, you cannot even access your own Dropbox contents unless you are behind a UK IP. There are various other Sony applications, including a wifi checker application - which seems kind of redundant. The only useful one is the Remote Control, which allows the tablet to function as a universal remote. Which is cool, I must admit, but even here there are problems. First, it cannot function as a remote control for PS3 even though there is Bluetooth support. Second, using the application does not prevent the device from going to sleep. So when you want to increase the volume, you need to first press the unwieldy power button, unlock the device and then press the desired function. Stupid. There are other problems, like the incomprehensible Favorites menu that does... Well, there you go, I have no idea what it does or why I should be using it. Various functions are doubled, like the Sony Music Player and the Android Music Player. Both suck.
Then there are two games on the device by default. When I mean by default, I mean that you can download those two games. One is Crash Bandicoot, a known quantity to GAF, but the other is Pinball Heroes, a shoddy and cheap pinball game that looks worse than a 99 cent game from the iOS market. Another fail.
Hardware issues
So I finally thought to try out some music on the thing. How do you get music on the device? There is a special File Transfer application that should do that, but for that you need a connection cable. Not a regular mini-USB cable, instead its retarded half-sister, micro-USB. Is there one in the box? Fuck no. And I don't have one in the house either, not since I sold my HTC HD2. The other should be the SD memory card. Does it come with a SD memory card? Fuck no again.
A word on the overall design. It looks great, but the bezel is too thick. The folded design is both fine and then it is not. Holding it like a folded magazine feels great. But try to grab the other side: it almost breaks. The screen is the only thing that deserves praise. The charging connector is retarded in both its placement and design. It is a long, multiple connector design that just screams failure at you. The touch screen is so sensitive that a dust particle falling on it can serve as a button press. Breathing too hard on it also registers as a button press.
I was growing angry with the damn thing and I decided to check out that fancy leather cover. Well, guess what: in order to use the cover, you need to glue strips of Velcro onto the tablet. Velcro that you will not be able to remove too easily. And then when you have the Velcro, the device no longer fits into the dock and you need to use the separate cable to charge it. What a fucking design disaster.
Conclusion
The Sony Tablet is quite possibly my worst purchase in 2011. It is a device that has been designed to be crap. The software side is broken and unless they really make strides with ICS, I don't think it's going to get any better. There is no clear roadmap for the device. There is no clear roadmap for the PlayStation games either - basically the PS logo on the fucking tablet is just a cocktease. I don't have friends who'd want to buy this piece of horse shit from me, not even for a fraction of the price. As it stands now, I will probably throw this mangled turd out of my window.
TLDR: Sony Tablet is shit, Android is shit, sales people lie like fuck. Don't buy the Sony Tablet.
