With Apple's second generation tablet on sale for a month, RIM's PlayBook hot off the manufacturing press, and Motorola's Xoom in customers' palms since February, the only surprise element to Sony's tablet unveiling was, 'why has it taken so long?'
Rumours of a dual-pronged assault on the booming tablet market by Sony had been circulating since the start of April, and the Japanese consumer electronics giant has finally put them to bed by using a press event to unveil its first two tablets.
Dropping in the fall
Codenamed S1 and S2, Sony's maiden tablets will both run version 3.0 (Honeycomb) of Google's Android operating system and will be available this autumn.
No details on pricing for the two devices were forthcoming from Kunimasa Suzuki, the company's SVP and deputy president of the consumer products and services group.
Suzuki did confirm, however, that the S1 will sport a 9.4-inch display, while the S2 will house two 5.5-inch touchscreens in a clamshell design.
All about the software
It also appears Sony has been paying attention to recent research from Gartner, which suggests that the key differentiators in the burgeoning tablet space will be software and ecosystem, not hardware specs.
For the S1 and S2 to take a noticeable share of the predicted 70 million tablet sales in 2011, therefore, their integration with PlayStation Suite (for gaming), Qriocity (for music and video), and Sony Reader (for e-books) must simply 'work' out of the box.
"Sony Tablet delivers an entertainment experience where users can enjoy cloud-based services on-the-go at any time," Suzuki said.
"We're aiming to create a new lifestyle by integrating consumer hardware, including Sony Tablet with content and network."
[source: Reuters]
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