The rumors about an ostensible Sony Xperia tablet have been doing the rounds for a couple of weeks now.The original source of the speculation was a leaked set of company slides that Mobiflip, a German tech site, got their hands on.
Now, a user in the famous XDA Developers forum has ended up leaking (what could be) press images for the Sony Xperia slate.
The XDA member, “xperiax10.awesome”, claims that the next gen Sony tablet has just passed through the FCC. He/she adds that the tablet’s expected launch date is sometime in September. This would make it directly compete with the iPad Mini launch (again, there’s no official confirmation about the Apple slate’s launch date either), which definitely can’t be a good idea, given that Sony’s last tablet, the Tablet S, was a mediocre seller.
The XDA user elaborates on the specs of the Sony tablet as well, by listing them as follows:
“CPU: Tegra3
CAMERA: 1MP(Front)/8MP(Rear)
BATTERY: 6000 mAh
BODY: Magnesium-Aluminium Alloy
WEIGHT: 570gm
RELEASE DATE: September
PRICE DETAILS:
16GB $399.99
32GB $499.99
64GB $599.99”
The Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset will certainly make the tablet a lot zippier than most other tablets. Moreover, it seems to indicate that the tablet will be running some version of Android, rather than Windows 8 (which supports a very limited number of chipsets, and Tegra isn’t one of them).
The leaked photos indicate that Sony has succeeded at making a genuinely good looking device yet again. But its launch date, coupled with its rather high price, could be a definite spanner in the works for the beleaguered Japanese company.
[source XDA Developers forums]
