It seems Sony’s almost entire 2014 line-up is getting leaked, and after we got some rumors about the Sony Sirius smartphone flagship, it’s now turn for their high-end tablet, called “Castor”, which seems like the successor to the Xperia Z tablet.
The tablet will apparently come with many of the same specs as the Sirius smartphone, including a Snapdragon 805 processor (still 32-bit, sorry), which looks like a slight improvement over the Snapdragon 800, and it should also come in both Wi-Fi only and 4G variants, for those who want may want to take the tablet on the go.
Sony has finally gotten back in the spotlight last year, because they finally started making some high quality products that don’t cost much more than they’re worth, as they used to do in the past. They’ve also managed to catch up in specs offered by the competition , and when I say specs, I don’t necessarily mean catching up with a list of bullet points, but catching up in things like real camera quality in their smartphones, too (regardless of how many megapixels their cameras had).
I’d say there are still some issues they need to resolve, that when put against the competition may seem quite major. One that bugs me a lot is their phone bezels, which really are quite huge compared to the bezels we see on LG, Motorola and Samsung’s high-end devices. It’s going to be even more obvious in 2014, if they don’t do something about it with their new line-up of products.
Another one that I think they’ve mostly addressed is the quality of their displays. They’re almost there, but not quite. It would be good for Sony to catch-up properly to the competitors just so it’s not an issue anymore, because it’s been a pretty long-standing issue with Sony’s devices.
Then, they need to just keep doing all the right things for everything else, such as: using the latest cutting edge processors (while moving to ARMv8 as soon as possible, hopefully), building thin and nicely looking devices that look quite high-quality, having great, if not the best cameras in the mobile market, and so on. If they continue doing all of that, and maybe even get to make the next Nexus phones to offer them a nice marketing platform in US, it might get a lot easier for them to get demand for their products in US, and also for carriers to make deals with them.