Sony released and showcased the Xperia Z2 back in spring of this year. But they, as per usual, announced their partner tablet, the Xperia Z2 Tablet alongside the flagship smartphone. The tablet wasn’t planned for United States marketing, so we here stateside saw no real advertising or special news happen, but people will and did buy this tablet, since it is a great value tablet for the price. Verizon Wireless, the United States’ largest carrier, has the latest Sony Xperia tablet for their network (to be released on July 17), with 4G LTE installed inside. Sadly, we won’t likely see any great amount of custom development for this one (since Verizon is horribly notorious for locking their devices’ bootloaders, which in turn disallows the installation of custom software). And that’s the big deal today: custom development for the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet.
Who would do that besides Sony for now? A fan favorite, everyone. Cyanogen has begun support for the newest tough tablets from Sony with the nightly builds from today (20140712, July 12 2014) after an apparently functional experimental build from the previous day. With this, Cyanogen has added the tablet, in both its Wi-Fi-only and LTE-enabled variants, to the sidebar of supported devices. For the Wi-Fi and LTE models, the names are castor_windy and castor respectively. Should you have either variant of this powerful tablet, you should go check out CyanogenMod and see if it’s worth a warranty to get, since rooting voids a manufacturer’s warranty and you need to be rooted to flash or install custom software to your device.
To recap what the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet has under its proverbial hood, here it is. The tablet has a 10.1 inch LCD panel, with a 1200 by 1920 pixel resolution. It sits on top of the main board that has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor running at a blazing (and now normal-to-see) 2.3 Ghz aided by 3 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage with a 64 GB-capable Micro SD card slot as well. The tablet runs Android 4.4.2, Kit Kat, out of the box, so enjoy that smoothness, if you see it.
The greatest part of CyanogenMod now running on the Z2 tablet is that it eliminates all the ‘software additions and features’ that often (or always, depending on your usage) slow down Sony tablets and phones. Now you can get pure and boosted Kit Kat on your uber-powerful tablet, and take it in the bath to get used to using real AOSP Android when it’s wet.