Sony Tablet P

Dual screens on a tablet is a pretty exciting concept, but does having two screens improve or hinder the tablet experience?

The screens themselves are also of wonderful quality and the whole device has a premium feel.

If you try to use Angry Birds on both screens, the middle of the screen — where all the action is — gets cut off by the bezel, so the game becomes really hard to play.

There’s also a quick-launch menu of sorts and a Favorites menu, which give you quick access to your most-used apps and bookmarks — that's nice, though it doesn't seem any more efficient than just adding bookmarks and apps to your homescreen.

The games are more expensive, but arguably provide better experiences as well.

With most apps, you get the option to either use it on the top screen, or on both; normally for web pages or apps like Twitter, it'd be great to have as much vertical space as possible.

There's some stuff to like, of course — multitasking is solid, for one — but Honeycomb's just not a great operating system.

Web and app download speeds matched most other Android tablets when within 5 feet of our test router; even up to 20 feet away, it retained much of its strength.

On the software front the Tablet P has Android 3.2 at its core (the tablet edition of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is still some way off), and Sony has used the same subtle skin seen on the Tablet S. Again any performance impact seems minimal and additional transition animations make the navigational experience far more fluid than stock Android 3.

The browser is a particularly bright spot, handling image-heavy sites (like this one) better than most Android devices, especially with respect to pinch-and-zoom: it wasn't perfect, but it was far better than the stock browser typically does.

This means many of Sony's Android PlayStation titles can run in the top screen while controls are sat in the bottom screen and the clamshell form factor means it can bend into a far more comfortable natural gaming position.

Gaming consoles meet Android tablets Two displays, 11 inches of screenSony's better at building cameras than it shows here Honeycomb needs to be left behind even more than Gingerbread Last year's internals still work well — mostly Even if its specs were high-end, the Tablet P wouldn't be In a market riddled with similar slates, no one's going to accuse Sony of adopting a copycat tablet strategy.

Functionality: The 5 meg back camera is a decent camera.

The smooth case is interrupted only by the slightly protruding hinge, the camera lens, and four tiny feet that make the tablet sit upright even though its back is rounded.

It’s frustrating to see such a lackluster effort from a company that builds world-class camera parts, and an excellent camera could have really set Sony’s tablets apart — it seems like Sony also knows people don’t care about their tablet cameras.