Sony S1

  

Sony S1 is a android tablet and has a wedge shaped design.

It is a comfortable tablet.It has 9.4-inch (1,280x768 pixels) touch screen offers great viewing angles and vivid colors. It offers a little extra grip and disguises smudges. It's a ingenious shrinking of the internal components, the S1 manages to feel relatively lightweight. Sony's credit, the S1 seems more durable while still maintaining a light and high-end feel.

On the sides of the S1 you'll find a socket for the power adapter, along with a headphone jack, USB sync port, and buttons for power and volume.

Compared against the ever-expanding sea of Honeycomb tablets on the market, there are a few key features that set the Sony S1 apart, aside from its design. The Android 3.0 experience looks largely unchanged, but Sony has added a unique "Favorites" pane to the top navigation bar, displaying a quick view of your recently accessed and favorite content. It has also added an optimization to the browser called 'Quick View' that gives the illusion of faster page downloading by prioritizing a page's images ahead of JavaScript. If you prefer to load your pages the old-fashioned way, the 'Quick View' feature can be switched off under browser settings.

The S1 is also fully compatible with Adobe Flash and Adobe Air. To spur the development of tablet-optimized apps built on the Adobe Air platform, Sony is sponsoring an application challange in the hopes of reaping some unique content.

Sony also touts its proprietary 'Quick Touch Panel' enhancements to the panel used on the S1 (and S2), allowing for more responsive multitouch input. With our limited time with the products, If nothing else, it's nice to see that Sony is sweating small details like these.

Other features, such as front and rear cameras and an internal speaker, are nice-but expected. Sony is promising that both tablets will be Play Station-certified for gameplay compatibility, though, which is certainly a feature that no other manufacturer will be able to brag about.

As far as disappointments go, we really wish Sony would give us a ballpark price. Assuming the S1 isn't the highest or lowest priced Honeycomb tablet we'll see this year, we can only cite the same issues that dog all the other Honeycomb tablets out there. The rate of development for tablet-optimized apps for Honeycomb seems slow to pick up momentum. The battery life of these devices still seems behind the iPad. And on that same note, the S1's lack of an HDMI output seems like a misstep. One surprise, though, is the inclusion of an IR blaster on the wide edge of the S1, which transforms the tablet into a giant DLNA-compatible universal remote.