Sony Tablet S / Tablet P

~ the goodbye ~

sony's tablet line landed in two parts. the tablet s arrived in the united states on september 16, 2011 at $499 for the 16gb model. it had a 9.4 inch screen, a tegra 2 processor, android 3.1 honeycomb, and a wedge-shaped body that tapered from 20.6mm at the spine to 10.1mm at the front edge. sony pitched the wedge as ergonomic, the way a folded magazine sits in your hand. the tablet p followed on october 28, 2011 with a wholly different shape. it was a clamshell with two 5.5 inch screens that folded against each other, almost a nintendo ds for adults running android.

the timing was bad in the way all of sony's 2011 consumer-hardware timing was bad. the ipad 2 had shipped six months earlier and was already the default tablet for anyone who had decided to own one. samsung was pushing the galaxy tab line hard. asus had a low-end honeycomb tablet in the same window. the tablet s was good enough but not different enough, and the tablet p was different enough but too weird. neither found a real audience.

by august 9, 2012 sony had announced the xperia tablet s, which moved the brand under sony mobile and dropped the standalone tablet sub-name. that was the first stake in the ground for the death of the original line. the tablet p was quietly discontinued in 2013 with no successor. by the end of 2013 the pre-xperia sony tablet brand was gone from the catalog and the surviving devices were xperia tablets in the same family naming as the phones.

i did not buy a tablet in this window. by 2011 i was 27 and at ttnet adsl in ankara, doing computer-engineering work on a desktop tower with a real keyboard. tablets in turkey in 2011-2012 were an ipad-or-nothing market for the people who bought them at all. android tablets did not have a strong import presence and sony's specifically did not show up at the media markt and teknosa shelves i would have passed. by the time the second-wave android tablet that turkey actually noticed appeared, it was the nexus 7, not anything sony made.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the wedge and the clamshell ~

the tablet s was the more conventional of the two. its hardware differentiator was an infrared blaster that could control a tv, which sony marketed as the tablet that could also be your living-room remote. that idea showed up again later in the xperia line. the tablet p was the genuinely weird one. it had two screens with a hinge, and developers had to decide whether their app would treat the two screens as one large 1024x960 display or as two separate 1024x480 displays. very few developers did the work. most apps just ran on the top screen and ignored the bottom one. that limited the device's appeal to people who already wanted a chunky folding sony product, which turned out to be roughly nobody.

~ the xperia rename ~

the move to xperia branding was a corporate housekeeping decision. sony ericsson had become sony mobile communications in february 2012 after sony bought out ericsson's stake. the rebrand made it convenient to fold tablets and phones, together with the new playstation-themed devices, into one xperia umbrella. the xperia tablet s launched august 2012 with an updated tegra 3 chip, but it was clearly a sequel to the wedge tablet rather than a new direction. subsequent xperia tablets moved to snapdragon and waterproofing, and the wedge shape disappeared by 2014.

~ what remained ~

nothing in the sony catalog after 2014 looks like the original tablet s or tablet p. the xperia tablet z series was thin and rectangular like every other android tablet. the dual-screen folding form factor stayed dead until microsoft's surface duo tried it again in 2020, and that failed too. the wedge tapered shape stayed dead. the tv remote feature ended up in some xperia phones, then went away. the two-device pre-xperia line is one of the cleaner examples of sony shipping interesting industrial design that the market did not reward, followed by the brand quietly absorbing those devices into a more conventional sibling line so the misses would not have to be acknowledged.

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