The prescribed tablet for those with a lust for life

How many people can say they got stranded in Amsterdam — their flight having been postponed to the following evening to avoid a super-storm swirling in the Philippines’ area of irresponsibility, and so the airline had to book the passengers in a hotel straight from The Shining? The TV being useless (all-Dutch, all day), the books brought along for the trip already displaying food stains and cigarette burns all over them, the only thing that kept them from tuning into the mysterious creaks of the hallway floors and far-off voices that seem to hover right beside their left ear is — brrrr…. — a piece of technology. When it happened to me a couple of years ago, the Sony Discman kept me sane. That particular Discman got stolen months later (along with it my Roxy Music CD, but that’s another story altogether), but that night in the doppelganger of the Stanley (Kubrick) hotel, I had to feed it reggae, ska, and happy-happy-joy-joy music I bought in old gray Vienna. And it worked. Slept like a log. My fellow passengers looked a bit nervy and jumpy. Like Shelley Duvall getting “REDRUM” as a text message. Or a bellboy ringing the doorbell named Johnny. 

Thank you for the music, Sony.

It has been quite a trip for me, personally. As a kid, I had the Sony Walkman tape recorder to play the two cassette albums I could afford at that time: “KISS Alive II” and Van Halen’s debut album. Our old house had a big-a$$ Sony boom box also, which was shared by everyone in the household. (The machine probably got confused with the sheer diversity of the music it had to play — Ray Conniff & The Singers, Anne Murray, Black Sabbath, Wham!, Uriah Heep, etc. On a Sunday, you’d hear, “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart but the very next day you…Sabbath, bloody Sabbath!” Then it was the Discman for me (having resisted those omnipresent portable MP3 players for a long time) — which played Morrissey in Cape Town and Fela Kuti in Camden. Now, I have before me the world’s slimmest tablet, the one with the fullest color spectrum — made by... wait…

 Heeeeeere’s Sony. And here’s the tale of the Xperia Tablet Z tape.

It is 6.99 mm slim, and it’s the lightest LTE tablet in the world at 495 g (could slide elegantly inside your hand-carried traveling bag with great ease). It has the highest level of water-resistance of any tablet (bring it to the beach or the pool, even watch Psycho while in the shower). Check out the Xperia Z Tablet videos online where it gets dunked into a pail of water and such. And the stunning OmniBalance design goes like Simon to your Xperia Z smartphone’s Garfunkel. Or like LeBron and D-Wade alley-ooping themselves into the NBA stratospheres.

If I had this bad boy with me in that hotel in the Netherlands (let’s get anachronistic for a minute here), I would be watching something un-scary in all its brilliant 10.1 HD Reality Display powered by the Mobile Bravia Engine 2 (1920x1200). It simply means thusly: you can watch Collin Farrell go ultra-violent in ruining Arnie’s old hammy but exciting movie and Philip K. Dick’s dystopian story. You can watch movies these days in MP4 or the more space-consuming MKV, and you won’t feel bad that you missed them on the big screen. I watched Avatar on a tablet. Yeah, yeah, my sci-fi fanatic bandmate Julius will rip his chest-hairs out when he finds out I’ve performed something sacrilegious against James Cameron. Nooooooo! But if I lent Jules the Xperia Z tablet, and he watched the Rush in Rio concert, the Sony S-Force 3D Surround Sound technology and Clear Audio + (wow, Geddy’s basslines cook!) would make him a believer. Sony’s audio experts have developed one fine sound machine, I tell you. Its manual equalizer mode does it for me, since I like more lows to my aural soup. Just listen to Donald “Duck” Dunn and Bob Babbitt on tracks with this black beauty; tracks from my Motown and Stax CDs are going straight for the mother brain.  

Since the Sony tablet has the fullest color spectrum on a tablet, my Yellow Girl will like watching her Pixar and Dreamworks movies with this tablet (getting gaga over Merida and bear mom in Brave, worked up because of Rapunzel’s misadventures in that Tangled of a movie) as well as her Japanese animes.

My niece wants to download a Sony PlayStation app so she could play her faves. Bring in Resident Evil in there. Or Dead Space.

Pictures are clearer (with an eight-megapixel fast-capture camera for HD pix and videos), battery life is longer (with its Stamina Mode, shuts down battery-draining apps), connectivity is a breeze (with one-touch functions via NFC), and there’s an entire universe of apps waiting to be discovered.

Everything in this slim black machine, a veritable Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams would’ve flipped!

Some members of the press recently had a chat with Sony Philippines marketing manager Vince dela Cruz. Dela Cruz explains, “The Sony Xperia Tablet Z offers the best of Sony technology. And while most other tablets seem fragile, the Sony is not. It also offers lots of customization — sound, display, etc. This is for customers who want a premium experience (when it comes to tablets).”

So, we can carry the Sony Xperia Z Tablet to, say, a Kubrickian Room 237 and we’re good to go.