Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet review

Last year’s Sony Xperia Tablet Z was a mixed bag of wasted potential and beautiful design. We hoped that in developing the Tablet Z’s successor, the Xperia Z2 Tablet, Sony might address some of our concerns, without compromising on the elegant design choices that set it apart from its rivals.

Physically, little has changed, and that’s a good thing: the Z2 shares its predecessor’s light, wafer-thin chassis. In fact, at 424g, it’s 71g lighter and has managed to shave 1.4mm from the thickness, from 6.9mm to 5.5mm. It’s a minuscule difference, but we were impressed nonetheless.

It retains its predecessor’s tasteful looks, too. The sides are deadly straight, the edges rounded off just enough to prevent the tablet from digging into your palms uncomfortably, but not enough to detract from the lean, spare design. Like its predecessor and smartphone cousins in the Xperia range, the Z2 also has dust- and water-resistant sealed flaps covering its ports, granting it a hardiness its rivals can’t match.

It still runs Android; this time it’s KitKat onboard, and there’s a familiar selection of subtle embellishments, such as the repositioning of the app drawer launcher icon to the top-right corner and the ability to reorganise apps within the app drawer.

The hardware has been improved, too, starting with the 1,920 x 1,200-resolution screen. We found that the Z2’s LED backlight topped out at a maximum brightness of 409cd/m², more than enough for outside use. The contrast ratio was impressive, too, at 908:1. It’s a significant improvement over the Tablet Z’s display, and it compares favourably with the current PC Pro A-List title-holder, the Apple iPad Air. The resolution is lower, but at the sorts of distances you’ll be holding a tablet, the Z2’s pixel density of 224ppi isn’t an issue; you have to look pretty hard to see the pixels.

The improvements continue under the hood. The Z2 has swapped out the Tablet Z’s 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro for a quad-core 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU, supported by 3GB of RAM and 16GB or 32GB of storage. It performed considerably faster than its predecessor, with a SunSpider JavaScript test score of 885ms to the Tablet Z’s more plodding score of 2,074ms; it also beat the now-ageing Nexus 10’s score of 1,362ms.