WHDI Reviews – Wireless HDTV News

Sony Tablet S

Sony has finally lowered the price of the Tablet S Android tablet, hoping to catch some sales before the holiday season goes out for good. The 9.4inch Android tablet is now available for $400 for the 16GB and $500 for the 32GB. This comes after the December attempt from Sony with a $50 price cut to try and cash in on the holiday shopping spree. With tablets like the iPad the Kindle Fire proving to be stiff competition to any other tablet in the market, Sony has finally decided to face the market realities it seems.

The Tablet S is a good-looking and well-built tablet but it lacks distinctive features that would’ve helped it to stand out from the rest of the market. It has joined the ranks of tablets from the likes of Lenovo, RIM’s (Research In Motion) BlackBerry and Toshiba as all of them try to take some market share from Apple.

Sony’s Tablet S is an Android device based on NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 SoC and it also has infrared built in so that it can be used to control home entertainment equipment such as Satellite boxes, TV’s, Blu-Ray Discs and cable boxes. It is even compatible with the Remote Control app from Sony that can control your Sony equipment such as Bravia TV’s through WiFi.

Sony’s recent price cut of the Tablet S is another confirmation of the current tablet market situation. There’s been a tidal wave of tablets that came out in 2011 and most of them are Android based with customized or stock UI. However, hardly any of them have made an impact on the consumer other than Apple’s iPad. But then the iPad is the device that brought on the new age tablet revolution in the market.

However, one of the newer entrants has made quite the impact on the market and that is Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. It is a completely customized Android tablet that is focused on content sold by Amazon through its online store. It also has access to a lot of other streaming content through services like Netflix. And top of it all off — it has the very affordable price of $199, which is driven it to them top of Amazon’s top selling list. Amazon also released a statement saying that the whole Kindle line sold millions of units last year and the holiday season was the best so far for Kindle.

However, pushing tablets right now is a good idea for all consumer electronics companies because even enterprise markets are shifting towards tablets. According to a survey, ¾ of all small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the US are preparing to deploy tablets in the next 12 months. These are companies that have less than 1,000 employees. The iPad though is the most considered tablet of all for these companies. So if another company wants to get in to that position, there’s stiff competition to overcome. This report comes from NPD Group’s SMB Technology Monitor report for the 3rd quarter of last year.