Sony Tablet Z works under water but cant make calls. Still Good?

Sony on Monday announced worldwide availability of its Xperia Tablet Z Android tablet. The device, announced earlier this year, represents Sony's attempt to lay claim to the premium Android tablet market: it is thin, light, and big on features. 

Though you can take this tablet under water for about 30 minutes, you cannot make calls from anywhere which I think is a major drawback. You dont have to pick the tablet to speak on call, but a network connection surely adds to the mobility that tablets are praised for.

The Tablet Z is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, with each core clocked at 1.5 GHz. This is paired with 2 GB of RAM and an Adreno 320 GPU for added horsepower. The Tablet Z features Sony's Stamina Mode, which can be used for power management. It includes 16 GB of on-board storage and supports microSD cards up to 64 GB for additional storage. The Tablet Z runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box.

On the connectivity side, Sony loaded the Tablet Z with most modern radios, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS/GLONASS, and select GSM, EDGE, HSPA+ and LTE bands. The device supports MHL (HDMI via microUSB) for connecting to television sets, a standard headphone jack, and strong software tie-ins with Sony's extensive PlayStation services.

Is the Sony Tab Z worth the money? Definitely. But it could have been better with calling. As an alternative, there are tablets powered by Intel and NVIDIA that you may look at.

Meanwhile in the Industry: IDC report

Android tablet vendors shipped an aggregate 27.8 million devices, giving Android 56.5% of the tablet market in terms of the operating system. Those same vendors shipped only 8 million tablets in the year-ago period. Android saw 247.5% growth year-over-year.

Microsoft's Windows 8 and Windows RT platforms together saw shipments of 1.8 million, giving them a combined presence of just 3.7% of the market.

-VK