Sony Android Tablets Introduced In Japan

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You may not think of them in this way, but Sony is sort of a big Android manufacturer. Their mobile phone manufacturer that they partly own, Sony Ericsson, is a huge Android phone manufacturer, while Sony was one of the driving forces behind Google TV and even admitted they were looking to come out with more Android products in the future. They’ve just introduced a pair of Android Honeycomb tablets that look pretty good.

At a press conference in Japan, Sony announces two Honeycomb tablets, the S1 and S2. The S1 is a 9.4-inch widescreen tablet (think Motorola Xoom, Toshiba Renza, or an iPad 2 if it was widescreen). The back of the device will be curved back, like a folded magazine (check out the pictures). It’ll be powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, which means it’ll be fast, and it is officially a “media tablet” and will have a heavy focus on Sony’s Qriocity media platform. It’ll also have its own custom web browser dubbed “Swift”. Will this be better than the Android Browser? Time will tell.

The S2 will be a dual-screen tablet (like the Kyocera Echo, or the Nintendo DS), which has two 5.5-inch screens.

Both tablets will be “PlayStation-certified” meaning that you’ll be able to access the PlayStation Suite store and play some PS1 games on them. You’ll also be able to read books from your Sony Reader and control your Sony HDTVs and other gear with the tablets, via an upcoming app. All in all, sounds like cool stuff.

Both names for the tablets, the S1 and S2, are just codenames at this point and you can expect these two tabs to land in fall of this year for all markets. They’re capable of WiFi as well as 3G/4G (no specific 4G modes mentioned – I assume Sony will support all of them in the US). Pricing wasn’t mentioned, either.

The tablet market is getting more interesting. Sony may have made some blunders in recent years (or recent days, with the disastrous PSN outage that still is going on), but they’re one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world, they’re a respected brand and they’re a sleeping giant in this industry. It’ll be interesting to see how their attempts at Honeycomb tablets shake out.