Performance and battery life
There may be a heart of the Tegra 3 buried
within this tablet made by Sony, but that quad-core performance does not
shine. Very too often, the Xperia Tablet S does not prove that it slowness does
not fit its powerful CPU. Try to wake the tablet from a sleep mode and you may
have to wait for 10 seconds, during this time you may have to press the power
button repeatedly. Take it to the home screen and there is more or less a game
of chance: will navigation be smooth or halting? The same thing is applied to
jumping in and out of the app drawer. The lack of connection between raw
processing power and inconsistent practical use also expands to the browser, which
is often loaded to full desktop pages quickly, but found it difficult to catch
up quick scrolling and pinch-to-zoom speeds.
Sony's
tablet performs quite well in the field of power management.
Many other issues emerged during the trial
period of the S, for instance, it was occasionally impossible to turn on Wi-Fi
or lock onto WLAN signal. Every time this issue occurred, we were able to
temporarily solve it with a quick restart. But that is not an acceptable
solution for a shelf-ready product. Sony has admitted to the problem in the
form of a software update soon, which claims to have solved the problem.
Sony
Xperia Tablet S
·
Quadrant: 4,349
·
Vellamo: 1,459
·
AnTuTu: 11,301
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,608
·
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps): 68
·
CF-Bench: 12,625
Sony
Xperia Tablet S
Acer
Iconia Tab A700
·
Quadrant: 3,311
·
Vellamo: 1,283
·
AnTuTu: 10,499
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,970
·
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps): 59
·
CF-Bench: 11,567
Acer
Iconia Tab A700
ASUS
Transformer Pad TF300
·
Quadrant: 3,659
·
Vellamo: 1,320
·
AnTuTu: N/A
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 2,120
·
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps): N/A
·
CF-Bench: N/A
ASUS
Transformer Pad TF300
Toshiba
Excite 10
·
Quadrant: 4,016
·
Vellamo: 1,471
·
AnTuTu: N/A
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): N/A
·
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps): N/A
·
CF-Bench: N/A
Toshiba
Excite 10
To compete with
other Tegra 3 opponents, all of them were running at 1.3GHz and packing 1GB of
RAM, the Xperia Tablet S usually scored high marks, with impressive SunSpider
results and smooth frame speeds. However, as you can see in the list above, we
were unable to have the final scores across all of our tests for the
Transformer Pad TF300 and Excite 10, so we cannot judge for sure. However,
while performance was able to quantify, the S is obviously the incontrovertible
champion. That's the reason why it's a pity that this tablet becomes a victim
of the problems of the real-life performance.
Sony's tablet performs quite well in the
field of power management, with an additional settings option to automatically
reduce the backlight levels. With moderate use of the light, you can wait a few
days to work from the 6000mAh battery. However, putting it through the usual
battery test, the battery life is 8 hours and 31 minutes - a result that places
the S pretty far below, especially compared with other 9-inch and 10-inch
tablets.
Camera
We'll say this as simply as possible: the
tablets are horrible for shooting images. If you have to shoot a quick image on
the road, please use your smartphones - that's the reason why they are called
mobiles. On the other hand, the tablets are inconvenient and difficult to use,
and the S is no exception. Counting the slickness of the S’s screen and its
inability to adjust zoom with the volume rocker, you have a fairly good reason
to never employ the camera application.
The
images that were taken with the rear 8MP camera are actually pretty good – when
you can make the tablet focus properly.
The images that were taken with the rear
8MP camera are actually pretty good – when you can make the tablet focus
properly. In general, the images are clear with a remarkable depth of field,
while color is precise accurate despite being bleak. Primarily, you should
avoid using the zoom function because it requires using the slider on the
screen and the images result in being so blurry that they are useless. The
camera application provides the array of scene modes that can be normally
selected, apart from the ability to reduce the resolution/ aspect ratio and
turn on/ off geo-tagging.
Video recording in 1080p is clean and
clear, but as you will see in our video sample, the autofocus regularly adjusts
again (a setting we pre-selected). It does not make the playback unable to
watch, but obviously you should not rely on the S to save those precious
moments digitally. At the time we recorded this short clip, there was a noisy
construction site in the background; the drum sound came from the nearby
performance art and the sound of traffic were ambient; none of which negatively
affected the recorded sound. To our surprise, the tablet succeeded in blocking
most ambient environmental noises without damaging the overall sound.
