3 Technology Link |
| Posted: 05 Dec 2011 02:43 PM PST
Comfortable, ergonomic design. Excellent music player. Good universal remote control app.
Expensive. Poor battery life. Aging CPU. No way to add memory. Buggy camera.
The Android-based Sony Tablet S is good looking and well designed, but it’s underpowered, overpriced, and doesn’t pull Sony’s multimedia services together in a convincing way. Here’s a riddle: Why is Sony not like Apple and Amazon? Sony is a multimedia powerhouse with a long history of solidly designed products, a full-fledged movie studio, a massive record label, and one of the world’s top gaming brands. The Sony Tablet S ($499 direct for 16GB, $599 for 32GB) tries to bring all of these legacies together, and it’s one of the best-looking Android tabletsaround. But where Apple’s and Amazon’s tablets fuse device and content seamlessly, the Tablet S does not. Physical Description and Battery Life Very-well-placed Power and Volume buttons are located in a recess on one side; on the other side there’s a smooth cover over a full-sized SD slot and a miniUSB port, both used for transferring files. The 9.4-inch, 1280-by-800 screen is tight and relatively bright. The tablet connects to the Internet using 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and also has Bluetooth. I didn’t have trouble initially connecting to our Wi-Fi networks, but the tablet took an irritatingly long time to reconnect when it woke from sleep in my tests. Battery life was deeply disappointing. In our standard test, playing a video with the screen on maximum brightness, we got only 4 hours, 45 minutes. Compare that with 7.5+ hours from both the iPad 2 and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime ($499, 4 stars). We even tested it twice. The Tablet S just isn’t a long-player. OS and Apps This tablet has more bloatware than any I’ve ever seen, and it’s all well-meaning but clumsy attempts to bring Sony’s services together. Apple and Amazon do things the right way: One sign-on (preferably upon login) and you’re in a unified, rich store full of diverse content. Sony spews its various divisions across its tablet in a scattershot mess. The PlayStation gaming store requires a different login than the Music and Video Unlimited services, and you need yet another account for Sony Reader ebook content. The Ustream and Crackle video-streaming apps, meanwhile, are just kind of hanging out, unmoored from Video Unlimited. A few apps are worthy of note. The PlayStation Store got me really excited, but all it has is a dozen games from the 1990s. Cool Boarders, MediEvil, and Destruction Derby all played smoothly, but they’re more than a decade old. The fact that they’re better than most Android games speaks to the sad state of Android gaming, not to the enduring excellence of the works of the ’90s. Select App is Sony’s stab at taming the chaos of the Android Market, a virtual magazine spotlighting about two dozen apps a month. It isn’t as good a solution as the custom app store on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus ($399, 3.5 stars) but it’s still helpful. The universal remote control app is excellent. I tried it with Samsung, Sharp, and Insignia TVs and TiVo and Dish set-top boxes, and it’s quick and responsive, unlike the Peel Remote app on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. The button layout isn’t quite as attractive as on dedicated hardware remotes, but it gets the job done. While I was setting up the Tablet S’s media services for testing, I ran into some bugs: things got sluggish at times, and sometimes the tablet spat out odd error messages. Trying to set up a PlayStation network account, for instance, gave me “an error occurred while performing this operation.” Trying to install Cool Boarders, the tablet demanded that I first set my clock properly. And thumbnails in the music and video players didn’t appear quite instantaneously. Multimedia The lack of storage is a pity because the customized music and video players are both solid and unusually fun. The music player not only has a great cover art view, it analyzes your music with a technology called “SensMe” to create Pandora/Genius-style automatic playlists of music that sounds good together. That’s really cool; I just wish I could have more than a few gigabytes of it. Audio sounded fine through wired or Bluetooth headphones. The video player displays all your videos as large thumbnails. It played WMV, MP4, and H.264 videos at up to 1080p resolution, but couldn’t handle XVID or DIVX videos. Sony goes all-in with DLNA here, so there’s no HDMI port. Instead, a DLNA app and ‘Send To’ buttons in the music and video players get your content to other Wi-Fi-enabled home theater devices. I’ve never considered DLNA easy to use, but Sony demoed it for me with some wireless speakers and it worked fine. Perhaps the trick is to mate your Sony Tablet with other Sony products. There’s a 5-megapixel camera on the tablet’s back and a 0.3-megapixel camera for video up front. The camera app crashed repeatedly, to the point which I’d consider it unreliable. Still images captured with the rear camera were moderately sharp with little low-light blur. Conclusions Sony tries to make the difference with content, but doesn’t pull it off. The selection of PlayStation games is disappointing, and Music and Video Unlimited don’t bring enough that you can’t get from other sources such as Samsung’s or Apple’s stores. If they were less expensive or more seamless, things would be different. But they aren’t. The Sony Tablet S charges a premium for design. If you’re an Android tablet lover with deep pockets, you may take to its unusually hand-friendly form. But for most people looking for a 10-inch tablet, we’d recommend the faster Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime or the more flexible Apple iPad 2. Spec Data
 Sony Tablet S : HorizontalThe Sony Tablet S is Sony’s first Android Honeycomb tablet, and it comes with a lot of proprietary Sony media apps.  Sony Tablet S : VerticalThe sleek, classy Tablet S also runs standard Android apps, of course; here it is enjoying a game of Cut the Rope. The unusual design is tapered on one side.  Sony Tablet S : FlatYou can more easily see the Tablet S’s tapered edge in this shot. It looks like part of the body is folded back, but that’s an optical illusion.  Sony Tablet S : RightThe power and volume buttons are on the right side of the Sony Tablet S.  Sony Tablet S : LeftOn the left side of the sony Tablet S, there’s a cover over a full-size SD Card slot. But the tablet doesn’t seem to be able to access files directly on the card; you have to “import” them first. (c) 2011 3tlink.info Share and Enjoy• Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • Digg • Delicious • StumbleUpon • Reddit • Google Buzz • FriendFeed • MySpace • Add to favorites • Email • Print • PDF | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Posted: 05 Dec 2011 02:32 PM PST
Blazing fast. Great gaming. Cool keyboard dock.
Some bugs. Honeycomb lacks both apps and a good app store.
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is the best Honeycomb tablet available, but the OS lacks the tablet-optimized apps to compete with the iPad. Welcome to the big leagues. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime feels like the first laptop-class Android tablet, with its quad-core 1.4GHz processor, clever add-on keyboard dock, and its support for USB storage and console gamepads. This is easily the most impressive Android tablet ever. But with such startling specs, it’s outstripping the weak app selection available for Google’s Android Honeycomb OS. Although there are a few standout apps for the platform, the lack of a thriving Android tablet app community makes the Transformer Prime a less sure choice than it should be. Physical Description and Battery Life Turn the tablet on to experience a slightly altered version of Google Android Honeycomb (3.2), with some custom widgets, slightly altered icons, and some exciting new settings when you tap on the lower left corner of the screen. One of the settings boosts the sharp 1280-by-800 IPS LCD into an extra-bright 600 nit mode, which takes the screen from slightly dimmer than the Apple iPad 2′s ($499, 4.5 stars) to somewhat brighter, albeit at the cost of battery life. But why are you buying this tablet without the $149 keyboard dock? The dock turns the Prime into a netbook, adding a six-row keyboard, whose keys are 94 percent as wide as standard laptop keys, and a trackpad below that. The keyboard’s top row is all function keys, and there’s a separate menu button; many Android features are mapped to keys so you won’t always need to touch the screen, although you’ll still have to reach forward for things like scrolling Web pages. The keys are comfortable to type on, but the trackpad button is extremely stiff. Almost as importantly as the keyboard, the dock adds an extra battery and a full-sized USB port so you can plug in flash drives, hard drives, or gaming controllers. Tegra 3′s added power doesn’t mean shorter battery life. It should mean longer battery life in many cases. In our standard test, with screen brightness turned to max, processor speed at normal, playing a video file until the tablet fails, we got a very respectable 7 hours 38 minutes of playback, almost exactly the life of the iPad 2. With screen brightness at 50 percent and the power profile set to “balanced,” Asus and Nvidia claim 10 hours of video playback. Plugging in the dock, which adds its extra battery, adds another 5-6 hours of life. The Transformer Prime is truly an all-day device. Performance You won’t see the blinding speed when you’re poking around the main UI or some of Google’s apps, as they’re occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets. But in an app that’s programmed well for this tablet (or in our benchmarks), the power comes out. The Prime has three Performance modes that you can set in the status bar. Power Saving mode caps the processor cores at between 600MHz and 1GHz depending on usage, caps video frame rates at 35 fps and lowers the screen brightness, all to save power. Balanced mode caps the quad-core processor at 1.2GHz per core. Normal mode goes all out. In Normal mode, the Prime scored a breathtaking 10,619 on the Antutu system benchmark, roughly doubling the score of even fast devices like the HTC Jetstream ($549, 3 stars), with its 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor. Much faster RAM and CPU scores made the difference; the tablet was on par with other recent devices for database access and SD I/O. The processor had less effect on Sunspider and Browsermark browsing benchmarks, although the scores of 17ms at Sunspider and 98324 at Browsermark were among the best we’ve seen on a tablet. Switching the modes down to Balanced, and then Power Saving had the expected effect. First I lost about 10 percent of the speed, and then half. This is a spectacular tablet for gaming. The boat game Riptide GP has more realistic water effects than on the iPad; I also played Zen Pinball and Big Top THD, both with rich, gorgeous, well-lit graphics. Adding the dock lets you plug in real gaming controllers, although it also forces you to play in landscape mode. Playing Riptide with a PlayStation 3 SixAxis controller was the best time I’ve had playing a game on a mobile device, ever. It’s much more responsive than tilting the screen. Zen Pinball is also much more playable with real buttons, though I would have liked to be able to play it in portrait mode. (Asus says the tablet also supports some Bluetooth controllers; but we didn’t test those.) Touch screens just aren’t the natural interface for many games. A good game controller can make all the difference. Adobe’s new PS Touch, an Android version of Photoshop, also showcases the tablet’s raw power. The app lets you perform complex, multilayered transformations on images. Combine it with Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro, get a stylus, and you have a terrific tablet for artists. The quad-core processor greatly speeds up PS Touch: A filter that makes a photo look like an acrylic painting took 1.4 seconds, as opposed to 5.3 on the dual-core Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1($499.99, 3.5 stars). I did run into some bugs during testing. The Market app stalled out a lot. The Browsermark benchmark sometimes crashed the browser. Occasionally while typing in office suites, the cursor jumped around for no apparent reason. When I plugged a USB stick into the dock too quickly after docking the tablet, the tablet wouldn’t recognize USB memory until after a cold boot. Scrubbing through a 7.46GB MKV video file made the video player quit at one point; a reboot solved that, too. There’s only one perplexing sore point: It takes at least twice as long to cold boot this tablet than any other I’ve tested. The Prime takes about a minute to boot; the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1and Apple iPad 2 take about 30 seconds. Apps, Such As They Are The Transformer Prime runs Android 3.2, just like most other Android tablets nowadays. An upgrade to Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is coming soon, Asus pledges. It comes with all the typical Google apps, plus some custom widgets and 8GB of cloud storage from Asus. The problem is, as always, finding apps that take advantage of the Prime’s hardware is much, much harder than it should be. The vast majority of the apps in Google’s and Amazon’s app stores are designed to work well on small, cheap smartphones, not to show off what a quad-core tablet can do. Google steadfastly refuses to force developers to include the “Max API” flag, an existing tag which could segregate the low-power, low-res phone apps away from tablet users. Nvidia has improved the situation a bit with its Tegra Zone, a free alternative app store which spotlights games designed for its Tegra 2 and 3 devices. For office work, you have the choice of a few suites; I tried DocumentsToGo and OfficeSuite Pro. They’re functional but quite basic. The keyboard dock works with them to enable popular keyboard shortcuts, though, so you can shift-select and then hit control-X to cut text, for instance. And you’ll have to post your document online; as with all Android devices, there’s no built-in support for printers. The Android interface also doesn’t have a quick way to easily flip between several windows. You can say the same about iOS, of course. But I have the Prime next to my Windows 7 netbook right now, and I’m missing the fluidity of being able to have two windows on a screen or to flip between tabs of things without poking the multitasking button at the bottom of the Android interface. The Prime’s hardware can do a lot of things at once, but the software doesn’t spotlight that. Multimedia Photos taken with the 8-megapixel rear camera were generally sharp, but had a distinct red cast in my tests. Outdoors, a bright sky washed out but the foreground was in focus. Low light performance on both cameras was very good, delivering surprisingly well-illuminated pictures. Videos recorded outdoors were sharp and smooth at 30 frames per second in 1080p resolution for the back camera and VGA for the front camera. The rear video camera took a bit of time to focus indoors, though, and the front camera knocked its frame rate down to 15 frames per second in low light. Obviously, the Prime plays any video format you can think of at resolutions up to 1080p. Lip sync was perfect over both wired and Bluetooth headphones, and outputting to a Samsung TV over HDMI was no problem. The speakers are unusually loud and clear, and streaming high-def YouTube videos looked better than on any other tablet I’ve ever seen. Conclusions The Prime beats the iPad and even some laptops on specs. It’s the finest Honeycomb tablet available. But its failings are Honeycomb’s. After seven months, Tegra Zone has 25 great games. iOS and Windows 7 each have hundreds, if not thousands. QuickOffice is a fine office suite, but it’s no Microsoft Office. I could go on. It’s absolutely possibly to create a great ecosystem out of nowhere. Apple did it on the iPad. Google has failed to do so with Honeycomb. This problem holds back Asus, Acer, Samsung, LG, Huawei, and, well, every Android tablet vendor. So if you’re considering the Prime, just make sure it does what you need. I can’t recommend it the same way I would the iPad 2, assuming that there’s an app available for whatever. If you’re a Droid through and through, you’ll revel in the power here. For Web surfing with Flash, for playing Nvidia’s Tegra Zone games, or for drawing in Sketchbook and PS Touch, the Prime is the ultimate experience right now.If you’re considering this tablet, you first need to go to market.android.com and make sure the apps you want aren’t just there, and that they’re optimized for tablets. Until Google can offer a broad array of easily discoverable tablet apps, tablets like the Prime will get good reviews, but won’t our wholehearted endorsement, or our Editors’ Choice. Spec Data
 Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : AngleThe first quad-core Android-powered tablet, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime starts out as a 10-inch tablet.  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : LaptopThe Transformer Prime turns into a laptop with the addition of the optional keyboard dock.  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : BackThe Transformer Prime has an 8-megapixel camera on the back.  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : SideThe Transformer Prime cuts a slim figure in laptop mode.  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : KeyboardThe Transformer Prime’s keyboard has many custom keys which are mapped to Android functions. It’s not quite full-size, though.  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : LeftThe power and HDMI jacks are on the left side of the Transformer Prime.  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : RightThere’s a full sized SD card slot and USB port on the right side of the Transformer Prime’s dock.  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime : BackThe Transformer Prime comes in purple and silver. (c) 2011 3tlink.info Share and Enjoy• Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • Digg • Delicious • StumbleUpon • Reddit • Google Buzz • FriendFeed • MySpace • Add to favorites • Email • Print • PDF |
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