Sony's S Tablet More than Just a Reader

Sine Mora

When Sony first revealed its Android-based Tablet S and announced that it would feature a 9.4-inch display, with the starting price of $500 for the 16GB model and $600 for the 32GB model, its September ship date was greeted with... Well, it was not greeted with excitement for the most part because most tech pundits saw it as just another tablet for reading books and surfing the web. Gaming Update took a closer look though, and found that the Android-based airfoil-shaped beauty has something more to offer to gamers than most tablets -- yes, we said "gamers."

If you thought that the S was just a run-of-the-mill iPad lookalike you would be way off base, because while it can do the same things as the iPad, there are things it can do that the iPad cannot, starting with play original PlayStation games!

The Tablet S is fully certified for the original PlayStation game library, a fact that instantly sets it apart from all of the other tablets on the market today. It matches the iPad in weight and in battery time, but when you add its built-in IR blaster app and Sony's well-designed remote control app, you end up with a lot more that you can do with it out of the box!

Using it as a universal remote control for home theater components and TV is cool, but the sweet spot for this tablet is its PlayStation certification, which means that it can be used to download original PlayStation games from Sony's online store -- and play them!

Don't get us wrong, Angry Birds on the iPhone and iPad gave us lots of entertainment on long flights, but being able to play the Army Men games again, but mobile? Yeah, that is something to get excited about!

While first impressions by tech reviewers were less than enthusiastic, we suspect that they were looking at the device as a tablet for reading books, which may be why they found the inclusion of the universal remote and games-centric capabilities a bit disconcerting, while we found their habit of commenting that the Tablet S is not an iPad to be a bit disconcerting... Of course it is not an iPad! It is a portable PlayStation!