BACK in September, consumer-electronics giant Sony chose the 2014 edition of the annual Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) in Berlin, Germany, to unveil the latest additions to its Xperia line of wireless-communications goodness, including its new flagship smartphone, the award-winning Z3, and its smaller but no less powerful sibling, the equally acclaimed Z3 Compact.
Since then, the Sony Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact have made their way to retail stores around these parts and, for the Z3, become part of the postpaid offerings of leading wireless-communications provider Smart Communications Inc.
Also now available in the company’s brick-and-mortar stores here is the Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact, which was also introduced at IFA 2014 and its latest offering to the burgeoning tablet market. The mouthful of a name may not roll off as easily as its best-selling smartphone cousins, but unlike them, not only does the tablet run Google’s Android goodness and appropriate the minimalist angular design language that Sony has embraced to much acclaim, but it is also one of the best buys, if not the best buy, in its product category.
With dimensions coming in at 8.40×4.87×0.25 inches, the Z3 Tablet Compact looks like a bigger but thinner version of Sony’s flagship smartphone. Yes, you will be tempted to hold it like a phone, and indeed you can do just that without unduly straining your wrist, given that this tablet is not only impossibly thin but also impossibly light at just 270 grams. Of course, holding it up against your cheek to take or make a call—unlike many others in its category, the Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-enabled Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact has GSM call functionality—might be pushing geek chic a bit too far, so we would suggest keeping a Bluetooth headset handy. That said, the tablet’s willowy profile makes it easy for you to slip it in and out of your purse or your bag, no problem.
Meanwhile, a quad-core Snapdragon 801 chipset with Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 2.5GHz plus 3 gigabytes of RAM help keep the tablet running with such buttery smoothness.
As with Sony’s other consumer-electronic devices, the construction of its new tablet offering is beyond reproach. There are no unsightly gaps where the different sides meet, and despite it being wafer-thin, the Z3 Tablet Compact betrays no yield in typical use and handling. The front of the tablet is protected by shatterproof glass with an oleophobic coating that makes it resistant to the buildup of fingerprints. Its plastic backside, on the other hand, has been given a matte finish, also to keep those paw marks at bay.
Like its smartphone siblings, the tablet boasts of IP65 and IP68 certification, which means that it is both dust-tight and waterproof, but do be mindful of closing the gurney flaps that cover the microUSB port and the nanoSIM and microSD slots before you take the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact poolside. The memory-expansion slot will happily take in cards packing as much as 128GB, and that’s a lot of movies and TV shows to watch on the go.
And speaking of movies and TV shows, this tablet makes media consumption such a compelling proposition with its 8-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen packing 16 million colors, with a 1200×1920 pixel resolution and pushing a 283 ppi pixel density, along with excellent viewing angles. In plain consumer-speak, that means the Z3 Tablet Compact boasts of a full-high definition (1080p) screen—and, yes, it’s an utterly gorgeous screen, yielding vibrant colors and accurate whites and stark-black blacks. As with its smartphone offerings, Sony has also put into play here its proprietary Triluminos and X-Reality display technologies which, no doubt, help in upping the pleasure levels in media consumption.
We watched 2002’s Minority Report and a couple of episodes of the fifth series of Downton Abbey back-to-back, and it was a thoroughly gratifying experience. Needless to say, viewing the photos you snapped with the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact’s solid 8.1-megapixel rear camera (there’s a 2.2-megapixel camera in front for selfies and videoconferencing) yields similar results. Meanwhile, text-only content looks crisp and clean.
Compulsive media consumption on a bigger screen—along with playing PS4 games on this PS4 Remote Play-powered tablet—can eat up a huge chunk of battery life of course. Mercifully, Sony has packed the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact with a 4,500mAh battery that the company claims can power the tablet for a marathon viewing for much a flight from the Philippines to the US. It also threw in its Battery Stamina Mode technology to further battery life. In real-world use, we were able to not only sit through the Tom Cruise-starrer and again immerse ourselves in the lovely upper-class world of the Crawleys, but also do the usual social-media stuff, work on electronic missives and hunt for steamy photos of Irish actor Jamie Dornan on the Web using Globe Telecom’s greatly improved LTE network without the tablet warning us that we needed to plug in until early the following day.
Given the notorious battery life of most tablets in the market, that’s nothing less than impressive.
There’s a lot more that makes the Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact the must-have gadget when you want a seamless fusion of sublime style and solid performance in a form factor bigger than a smartphone’s, and you can check it out at http://tinyurl.com/ohpy2wy.
