The Xperia Z2 Tablet is a successor to last year’s Xperia Tablet Z, and like what we’re seeing in Sony’s smartphone range, the device is an incremental update to what came before. Like the Tablet Z, the Z2 Tablet is fully water resistant, packs a 10.1-inch WUXGA display, and is under 7mm thick. The most significant update is the specification bump to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 801 SoC, plus there’s an improved camera and a sizable weight reduction
So is the Android 4.4-powered Xperia Z2 Tablet worth the $500 asking price, or is it another largely-forgettable 10-inch tablet?
The Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet used in this review was provided by Expansys. Check them out for unlocked, off-contract devices at great prices, with fast shipping around the globe.
Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet: $499 - $63910.1”, 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD display (224 ppi)
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC
- 2.3 GHz quad-core CPU, Adreno 330 GPU, 3GB RAM
- 16/32 GB internal storage, microSD card slot
- 8 MP camera, 1/4” sensor, f/2.4 lens, 1080p video
- IP58 water resistant
- 6,000 mAh, 23 Wh battery
- LTE (optional), Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC
- Android 4.4 ‘KitKat’
- 439 grams, 6.4mm thick
DESIGN
The highlight of the Xperia Z2 Tablet is definitely the design, which could be the best I’ve seen on an Android tablet to date. Sony has largely used the same design language as seen on their Xperia Z smartphones but adapted for a larger and thinner form factor, and it works to perfection.
The thinness is striking from the moment you take the Z2 Tablet out of the box. At just 6.4mm thick, the device is beautifully crafted and feels fantastic in your hands, complemented by a light (439 grams) construction that keeps the tablet portable. Compared to a machine like Microsoft’s Surface 2, the Z2 Tablet looks slender and unquestionably fantastic.
Build-wise, the Xperia Z2 Tablet is as fantastic as I’ve come to expect from Sony’s high-end devices. The front panel is an all-glass affair that makes the screen a breeze to use, while the back turns to a soft-touch plastic to protect the internal hardware. On Sony’s smartphones we’ve seen a glass back panel that looks great, but this doesn’t make as much sense on a tablet due to the fragility and weight of the material, so I’m perfectly happy with the plastic used.
In keeping with Sony’s past few devices, the Xperia Z2 Tablet is fully IP55 and IP58 water resistant, indicating it’s protected against low pressure water jets and capable of withstanding submersion in 1.5m of fresh water for up to 30 minutes. It’s also protected against the ingress of dust, for what it’s worth.
Like all waterproof devices with a capacitive touchscreen (eg. the Samsung Galaxy S5), it’s impossible to use the touchscreen when the tablet is fully or partially submerged in water. This significantly reduces the usefulness of this feature, especially when considering how it’s unsafe to submerge the tablet in salt water due to the risk of corrosion.
The best reason I can come up with for wanting a waterproof tablet is that you can use it in the bath without fear of ruining it should you accidentally drop it into the water. Similarly, there’s no fear of split water or other liquids destroying the tablet. However, its lack of resistance to salt water makes it a bad decision to take the Z2 Tablet to the beach, and it’s essentially useless underwater.
Yes, you can take photos underwater using the volume rocker, but you’ll look pretty stupid using a tablet for any sort of serious photography.
The effort to waterproof the Z2 Tablet has some downsides to it, mainly the flaps along the top edge of the device that protect the microSD card slot and micro-USB port from water ingress. These flaps are much harder to open than their smartphone counterparts on the Xperia Z1, which is annoying whenever you want to charge the device.
The flap for the microSD card slot is fairly large, and appears to also house a spot for the SIM card slot if this were the LTE-capable version of the tablet. Also along the top edge you’ll find the IR LED for controlling TVs.
Around the other edges of the tablet there’s the circular power button and volume rocker mid-way down the left side, while there’s nothing on the right. The bottom sees the 3.5mm headphone jack tucked into the very left corner, and in the middle is Sony’s typical magnetic dock connector.
Hidden along each side of the front panel you’ll find stereo speakers, which are acceptable quality for a tablet and capable of providing a decent volume. Stereo speakers are really critical on a media-centric tablet like this, and I’m always glad whenever a company decides to include them
DISPLAY
The Z2 Tablet packs a 10.1-inch IPS TFT LCD display with a resolution of 1920 x 1200, branded as “Triluminous” featuring the “X-Reality picture engine” and “Live Colour LED”. Basically these marketing terms – which Sony has used before to describe their Xperia smartphone displays – refer to the panel’s wide color gamut, software processing engine, and uniform LED backlight respectively.
The Z2 Tablet’s display is essentially a larger version of the Xperia Z2’s display, meaning color reproduction and viewing angles are the same as their latest flagship smartphone. This results in a generally fantastic display that’s great to look at, producing vivid colors with a decent level of depth and contrast.
The Live Colour LED backlight delivers an accurate white level and helps the display achieve a wide color gamut. It appears the gamut of the panel is wider than sRGB, so there will be some color stretching as Android lacks color management tools, resulting in a slightly inaccurate image compared to a panel that displays the exact sRGB spectrum. That said, images on the Xperia Z2 Tablet look great and I don’t think accuracy will be a huge concern for most consumers.
In terms of pixel density, the 10.1-inch display with an area of 296 square centimetres and resolution of 1920 x 1200 boasts a density of 224 PPI, which is typical for a current generation tablet of this size. Holding the Xperia Z2 Tablet at a typical viewing distance makes it hard to distinguish individual pixels, making text look crisp and clear. Higher resolution 10-inch displays do exist – we saw 2560 x 1600 on the Google Nexus 10 – but I’m perfectly content with the Z2 Tablet’s WUXGA panel.
With a resolution just larger than 1080p, you’ll be able to watch Full HD content natively with a small amount of letterboxing, which is typical for an Android tablet. Factoring in the navigation bar at the bottom of most apps, the usable display resolution reduces to 1920 x 1128: just shy of standard 1080p.
SOFTWARE
Out of the box, the Xperia Z2 Tablet is equipped with Android 4.4 and a custom Sony skin that’s a tablet adaptation of their smartphone UI. There’s nothing particularly exciting about this UI, and most of the features you’re used to as part of Android on a tablet are relatively unchanged.
Of the areas Sony has changed, there’s a nice lockscreen and a few okay homescreen widgets, but nothing really jumps out to me as being spectacular. The general design of Sony’s skin is okay, but as usual I would prefer the visually-pleasant stock Android over skinning for the sake of skinning. As is typical for devices that have received an OEM software makeover, the design of the skin doesn’t meld well with the remaining stock Android elements littered around apps such as Gmail.
The applications on the Xperia Z2 Tablet have basically the same features as the stock Android apps you’d find in a vanilla installation of Android 4.4, save for a few changes here and there. Of the features Sony has added – such as floating windowed apps (eg. calculator, calendar), ‘Throw’ for quick media streaming, and a few personalization options – nothing is especially new or interesting.
CAMERA
The camera on the back of Xperia Z2 Tablet is Sony’s Exmor RS IMX134 sensor we previously saw in the Xperia Z Ultra. It’s an 8-megapixel 1/4” CMOS sensor with 1.12 µm pixels, accompanied by an f/2.4 28mm-effective lens, and capable of 1080p30 video. On the front you’ll find OmniVision’s OV2720 1/6” 2-megapixel CMOS with 1.4 µm pixels, designed for HD video calls and selfies.
Tablets aren’t typically a major source of photography, which is a good thing considering the Xperia Z2 Tablet’s camera is mediocre except in the best of conditions. If you happen to be shooting a scene that’s bright and sunny, the IMX134 will do a decent job of capturing the conditions with acceptable dynamic range, color saturation and contrast; but if it’s not sunny, it’s best to use the Z2 Tablet’s camera sparingly.
Most of the issues shooting in cloudy, indoors or shadowed conditions revolve around poor white balance and a lack of color vibrancy. Photos of interesting subjects appear dull and boring when photographed by the Xperia Z2 Tablet in these conditions, with a distinct level of washing out. Inspecting full resolution crops reveals a passable level of crispness and clarity, although it’s clear Sony is applying strong post-processing filters to clear up grain.
PERFORMANCE
The Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet is one of the first tablets to hit the market that uses the Qualcomm Snadpragon 801 SoC, which is also found in the Xperia Z2 smartphone and other high-end handsets released at the start of 2014. The Snapdragon 801 variant found in the Z2 Tablet is the MSM8x74AB, which is clocked slightly lower than the top-end MSM8x74AC; due to the two variants, you’ll either get an MSM8974AB (LTE model) or the MSM8074AB (Wi-Fi-only).
While the MSM8x74AB supports a maximum clock speed of 2.36 GHz across all four Krait 400 CPU cores, the Xperia Z2 Tablet reports a maximum clock of 2.27 GHz. It’s paired with an Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 578 MHz, the Hexagon QDSP6V5A DSP at 600 MHz, and a 32-bit dual-channel memory controller sporting 3 GB of RAM with 14.9 GB/s of bandwidth.
There’s nothing too surprising about the SoC in the Xperia Z2 Tablet, as I’ve covered it in more detail in my reviews of the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5. It’s supported by Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0 radios, plus Category 4 LTE if you get the LTE model.
The Snapdragon 801 is mighty powerful as usual, making the Z2 Tablet fast to use. Surprisingly, effects around the home screen aren’t as buttery smooth as I was expecting when the default live wallpaper is enabled, but I’ll put this down to a software optimization issue on Sony’s side. Switching to a static wallpaper rectifies the issue, and after that I had no problems with the performance throughout the interface.
Generally speaking application and game performance on the Z2 Tablet is identical to what I experienced on this year’s high-end smartphones that also use the Snapdragon 801. The display is 1920 x 1200, so there’s a small reduction in 3D performance when rendering to the entire display compared to devices with 1080p panels, but it’s not noticeable on a device that’s as fast as the Z2 Tablet.
In GPU-centric benchmarks we see the Adreno 330 GPU dominate Intel’s Bay Trail offering, although it falls behind AMD’s Discovery reference platform that we previewed late last month. These results aren’t too surprising considering what we experienced with Snapdragon 801-powered phones, but it’s great to see the Z2 Tablet performing well.
Inside the Xperia Z2 Tablet is 16 GB of NAND complemented by a microSDXC card slot that supports up to 128 GB cards. Of the internal storage, 11.2 GB is available to use out of the box, so I’d recommend getting a microSD card for extra data such as videos and music. The space can fill up quite quickly when you’re installing large apps like Real Racing 3, but with that microSD card inside, it’s less of a concern.
Like other Snapdragon-powered tablets, I had no trouble using the 5 GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n capabilities to stream videos from my home media server to the tablet. 1080p content can easily be viewed from a local network source without lag or stutter, while browsing the internet was equally no trouble. Other connectivity options, such as Bluetooth, GPS, and NFC worked well, although it has been some time since those features have failed me.
It’s great to see that Sony has put a small NFC logo on the back of the tablet where you can find the NFC chip. As the connectivity is so close range, sometimes it’s hard to get NFC working between a tablet and another device when you can’t find the right spot on the tablet’s body. This is no issue with the Xperia Z2 Tablet.
BATTERY LIFE
Inside the Xperia Z2 Tablet we find a 22.8 Wh (6,000 mAh at 3.8 V) battery, which is a reasonable size for a tablet this thin and light, but not hugely amazing. Windows 8.1 tablets I’ve reviewed in the past, such as the Asus Transformer Book T100, managed to pack a 30+ Wh battery into their 10-inch frame, although the ARM components inside the Z2 Tablet should be more power efficient than their Intel counterparts.
Above you’ll see the results from our usual video playback battery test, which is a low intensity benchmark that shows the energy efficiency of the SoC and the display. Decoding 720p is hardware accelerated on all Android devices these days, although the 75% brightness requirement can strain the more wasteful panels.
CONCLUSION
There are many things that Sony has done right with the Xperia Z2 Tablet. For one, the design is absolutely incredible: a slim and light body is complemented by great materials, IP58 water resistance, and a solid construction, making the tablet look and feel futuristic. The bezels are a little too large, but after a week of using the device it’s easy to look past this flaw.
Internally, the Snapdragon 801 SoC is extremely powerful, making the Xperia Z2 Tablet one of the fastest ARM-based tablets available. The display used is also fantastic, fixing the issues of Sony’s past panels while producing vivid colors and great clarity thanks to its WUXGA resolution. Battery life isn’t as good as it could be, but at the same time it’s not overly terrible.
The only aspect of the Z2 Tablet’s hardware that’s subpar is the camera, which may be a Sony Exmor RS sensor, but generally produces poor results. Luckily the camera on a tablet isn’t that important, so it’s unlikely it’ll affect anyone’s purchasing decision.
But the good hardware of the Xperia Z2 Tablet is let down by poor software. Android on a 10-inch tablet just isn’t all that special, lacking when it comes to both applications and features, where iOS and Windows 8.1 succeed respectively. There’s nothing that’s especially terrible about tablet Android, but it’s still behind its competitors and there has been little improvement since the last time I used it.
Pros: Fantastically thin, light and waterproof design. Snapdragon 801 provides more than enough power. Great display caps of a generally solid hardware offering.
Cons: Android is lacklustre on 10-inch tablets compared to iOS or Windows. Camera isn’t that good. Bezels are a little too large.
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