which is rare for a tablet — and they have an impressively full-PriceAngels

There's not much to the newest tablets besides its 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200 display. As always, Sony makes a big deal of its Bravia heritage, touting the company's TV prowess as evidence that it knows how to make displays. Sony's TV division might want to distance itself from the Tablet Z's display, though: it's sharp and clear, but something has clearly gone wrong with the color reproduction. "White" is really more like yellow, so everything you look at has odd, almost old-fashioned tones — Fast Five took on a strange 1960s Western feel, which is awesome but not exactly correct. Off-color whites also throw off every other color, leaving the Tablet Z feeling like it's just been miscalibrated.

Sony's other divisions also contributed to the Tablet Z's speakers, and its camera. In both cases, the result is good without being overwhelmingly impressive: the 8-megapixel camera is fine but not meaningfully better than any other tablet despite Sony's pronouncements about its backside-illuminated sensor, and the lens' placement all the way in the top left corner of the back makes framing any close-up shot really awkward.

The speakers get louder than most — I could hear the Tablet Z over my air conditioner, which is rare for a tablet — and they have an impressively full, rich sound simply because there are four grilles surrounding the bottom two corners of the tablet. Of course, all that just exacerbates the fact that it sounds like you're listening to music on an 1880s gramophone, and there's so little bass response that Kanye West's "Black Skinhead" sounds a bit like an a cappella song with a snare drum.dfjhqDS32

The Tablet Z's 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor isn't the best on the market, but it doesn't really need to be — it's been a while since power has been an issue for Android tablets. The Tablet Z works just fine, with little lag or slowness whether you're playing a game or just swiping around the operating system. It even multitasks well, thanks certainly to its 2GB of RAM. The base model comes with 16GB of internal storage, and the $599 version has 32GB — both come with microSD slots so you can augment as you see fit.

Basically, it works like an latest android tablet: scrolling stutters in some apps, as it always does, and the occasional app can take a beat or two to open, as it always does, but nearly everything works as it's intended to. Unless the tablet's underwater, of course, at which point all hell breaks loose.

If there were a tradeoff Sony was going to make in order to squeeze the Tablet Z into its tiny frame, I figured it would be battery life. My worries were mostly unfounded, though, since at seven hours and nine minutes on The Verge Battery Test the Tablet Z is well above average for a 10-inch tablet. It's no iPad, which lasted better than nine hours, but it's better than many, and in more normal use lasted two or three days. That's really all I expect; everything else is just gravy.