Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact review

The Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet long reigned as our favourite Android tablet, thanks to its combination of a stunningly thin design and excellent performance. The new Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact, fortunately, shares a lot in common with its larger predecessor including its incredible thinness.

Sony has yet to announce a 10in tablet with the Z3 name, making us think it will concentrate on 8in models from now on. We find 8in models are becoming increasingly popular as a good compromise between portability and screen size, but some may still prefer the 4:3 aspect ratio of an iPad or Google Nexus 9, which makes a tablet feel more natural to use in portrait mode.

There's no doubt the Z3 Tablet Compact looks great. It's amazingly slim at just 6.4mm, and weighs just 270g, which is a whole 140g less than the 8in Tesco Hudl 2. More impressively this tablet is 1mm thinner and 60g lighter than the iPad Mini 2. That low weight is easy to appreicate too, as the Z3 is supremely comfortable to hold one-handed due to its super-thin chassis. The frame is made from aluminium, which also helps keep the weight down. The back is made from a slightly textured soft plastic that's pleasant to touch and hold.

The Z3’s party tricks don’t stop at just being thin and light, either. It’s also waterproof and resistant to dust particles, meaning you can safely use it to take pictures while in freshwater for up to 30 minutes at a time, although only to depths of 1.5m. Therefore you might want to avoid actually dropping it in a pool, and you’ll also need to make sure the various slots are sealed beforehand.

Impressively, Sony has done away with the need for a flap to seal the headphone connection. Forgetting to close such a flap could have well been the cause for your tablet’s watery demise as it’s so regularly used and easy to forget about. There’s also a magnetic charging dock connector on the side, again waterproof, but this does disrupt the Z3 Tablet's clean lines.

DISPLAY

Like the Xperia Z2 Tablet, the Z3 Tablet has a display resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels, although these are packed into a smaller 8in screen. This gives it a pixel density of 275ppi to the Z2’s 224ppi, making the pixels even less discernible and text and images appear incredibly sharp. Colour accuracy turned out to be one of the Z3 Tablet’s strong points, with the display able to produce an astonishing 98.2% of the sRGB colour gamut. This is one of the highest readings we’ve seen on a tablet, eclipsing the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 with its 88.7% accuracy and the Google Nexus 9's 93.8%. To our eyes, however, the Z3 Tablet had a subtle blue cast that gave the screen a slightly cold colour temperature in our subjective image tests; this didn’t affect how much we enjoyed using the tablet, though. 

Although colour accuracy was impressive, the Z3 Tablet’s black levels didn’t quite reach such dizzying heights. The tablet only managed black levels of 0.62 cd/m2, which isn't as deep as we'd like to see. Similarly we were a little disappointed with its contrast ratio of 875:1, which wasn’t as high as on the Google Nexus 9. The Z3 Tablet does have an exceptionally bright screen, however, with our calibrator measuring white levels at a searing 546.8 cd/m2, meaning the display was easy to see even when outdoors.

PERFORMANCE

Although the Xperia Z3 Tablet shares the same resolution screen as its predecessor, it has received a substantial performance upgrade through its quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 system-on-chip running at 2.5GHz - a 200MHz speed increase for each core. This is paired with a very generous 3GB of RAM. The tablet felt highly responsive when we were navigating around Android 4.4, with apps and menus opening in a swift manner.

With a score of 1,022ms in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, browser performance wasn’t as high as we would have liked. This is only a fraction behind the Google Nexus 9 (980.8ms), but both are eclipsed by the incredibly fast browser performance of the Apple iPad Mini 2 with its blistering 408ms. Nonetheless, the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact is a perfectly capable tablet for browsing the web and never stuttered under the load of image-heavy or complex web sites. 

GAMING

The tablet's gaming performance is strong. It maxed out our Ice Storm Extreme test and managed a very respectable 18,077 in Ice Storm Unlimited, which runs at a fixed 720p resolution to help compare the performance of different tablet chipsets. This isn’t as high as the Google Nexus 9 or Nvidia Shield Tablet's figures, which are the Android gaming power champions, but the Z3 will definitely be able to handle graphically complex games such as Assassin's Creed: Pirates with high detail levels. All this power doesn’t come at the expense of battery life; in our video playback battery test, the Xperia Z3 managed a colossal 16 hours and 51 minutes, which is one of the best scores we’ve seen.

The tablet’s gaming credentials don’t stop there. If you own a PlayStation 4 you can also use the Z3 Tablet to play PS4 games over your network using the Remote Play service. This means you can use your PS4 controller to play games all over the house on your tablet, helping avoid arguments when the living room TV is in use. You’ll need to have both the PlayStation 4 and Xperia Z3 connected on the same wireless network.

The Xperia Z3 runs Android 4.4, with Sony's usual classy customisations, such as some good-looking icons and backgrounds that animate as you move between app trays. Sony has installed a number of its own apps, including a PlayStation app that lets you check messages and view your trophies if you own a console. There are also shortcuts and widgets for Sony’s digital stores for music and video.

CAMERA

Sony has its own Camera app for the 8-megapixel rear and front-facing 2.2-megapixel cameras. This app has features like ‘Background Defocus’, which is designed to replicate the background blur effect from DSLR cameras. There’s also ‘AR Effect’ which uses augmented reality to add in virtual characters such as Spiderman into your shots. This is fun but probably not something you’ll use once the novelty wears off. We found the ‘Panoramic Sweep’ and ‘Manual’ modes much more useful. Photo quality was only average; the camera was able to capture a decent amount of detail in good light, but images were still quite grainy and lacking in sharpness. Colours were also subdued. Low-light performance was rather poor and introduced a lot of noise.

CONCLUSION

The Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact is undoubtedly a premium tablet. Its build quality is fantastic and it’s razor thin, making it easy and convenient to carry around, and the water- and dust-proofing is useful. Its performance is also top-notch, and Sony has said it will upgrade the Z3 Compact to Android 5 Lollipop early in 2015. The addition of PS4 remote play alone will be enough to sell it to some.

However, you are paying a hefty premium for all this. The Z3 Tablet costs £329 with 16GB of built-in storage and £379 with 32GB. You can also buy the 16GB version with LTE for £429, but not the 32GB version strangely. A few months back that wouldn't seem too unreasonable for such a device, but Apple has sliced the price of its iPad Mini 2 down to £239. Unless you're dead set against using iOS, the metal-bodied iPad with its 4:3 screen is a better buy for £90 less.

If you're dead-set on a high-end compact Android tablet, the choice comes down to this or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4. The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 has a superior, higher-resolution screen, but can't match the Sony tablet's build quality, 3D performance or battery life. We think the Samsung's amazing screen makes it just pip the Z3 Tablet Compact overall, but Sony's tablet is a better bet to use on the move.