Was the Nintendo DS-like tablet ahead of its time?

There was a time when Sony sold some reasonably decent Android tablets. The Xperia Z line of premium tablets offered some very high-end specs back then, but as we’re used to from Sony, they were pretty expensive. The range offered everything you would expect from a conventional Android tablet, but ended in 2014 after only two short years on the market.

Sony’s tablet ambitions have not always been as conventional. Before the Xperia Z tablet series with the Sony Tablet P from 2011 was a slightly more unusual product. With two displays and a central hinge, the design was much more reminiscent of the Nintendo DS dual-screen gaming handheld that came all the way in 2004. Sony had experimented with this form factor a few years earlier, with devices like the compact “lifestyle PCs” Sony Vaio P running Windows XP. Needless to say, the idea didn’t exactly catch on.

See also: The best Android tablets to spend your money on

Get to know the Sony Tablet P. know

Sony’s clamshell tablet was pretty much the opposite of commercial success. In retrospect, one wonders what was going through the mind of the Sony engineers at the time.

In terms of hardware, the Sony Tablet P had two 5.5-inch displays and, despite being designed to fit in your pocket, weighed quite a hefty 372 g (0.82 lb) and was 28 mm (1.1 inch) thick when closed .

The device was powered by a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor with 1 GB of RAM and a whopping 4 GB of onboard storage. Back then, it was not exactly cutting-edge and significantly less powerful than 2012 flagship smartphones such as the quad-core Samsung Galaxy S3. But Sony had the audacity to charge $ 599, which was more expensive than competitors like the Samsung Galaxy Tab Plus 7.0 and most of the flagship smartphones at the time.

Perhaps worse, however, was the software. The Sony Tablet P comes with the tablet-specific Android 3.2 Honeycomb OS. Sony has developed its own applications to take advantage of the dual display, but these were a mixed bag themselves. Videos and games that play on the upper display with controls at the bottom. When sending messages, e-mails and the like, the Sony keyboard fills the lower display. Sony even used some of its PlayStation titles on the Tablet P, though the selection was small and never expanded.

Worse, the device didn’t have any built-in multitasking capabilities; So you can forget to watch videos and surf the web at the same time. Third-party apps were obviously unfamiliar with dual-screen or even the aspect ratio at the time. They either landed on the small top screen or clumsily stretched across both screens, complete with a thick black bar in the center of the app.

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It was a novel idea, but the Sony Tablet P turned out to be one of the company’s biggest technological flops. Prices dropped to just $ 199 just a few months after launch. While an Android 4.0 Jellybean update was planned and even announced, the tablet disappeared from Sony’s storefront before the update was even rolled out.

Just ahead of its time?

Some of these devices have problems similar to the Tablet P, such as hinges and kinks in the middle of the display or dubious software elements that struggle to make the most of the extra screen space. However, both hardware and software have improved significantly over the past decade. Flexible, foldable and rollable displays break previous hardware limitations, while better operating system support for multiple windows and variable aspect ratios helps solve the app problem. Weird and wonderful display setups become possible every year.

If more screen real estate is really the future of the phone, and phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 and the Oppo X 2021 concept go mainstream, the next time we look back at the Sony Tablet P, we’ll be calling it ahead of its time.

This is the sixteenth entry in our Did You Know series, where we dive into the history books of Android and consumer technology to uncover important and interesting facts or events that have been forgotten over time. What would you like us to cover next? Let us know in the comments.