What an interesting 24hours it has been regarding Sony and the Playstation Network. Sony held a press conference early this morning to announce officially their two upcoming Android tablets, codenamed the S1 and S2. Both will be Playstation certified. This afternoon, Sony finally came clean about what happened to the PSN as well.
Interesting enough, the S1 Android tablet will feature Qriocity, a service for content on demand by Sony, which also was one of the services affected by the illegal intrusion that happened which has caused the outage recently of the Playstation Network and Qriocity. I guess Sony likes to butter everyone up with some good news before dropping the bomb about personal information possibly getting compromised due to the attack on their network.
However, both the S1 and S2 are looking like pretty solid offerings in the Android tablet arena. The S1 will be the Qriocity focused tablet measuring in at 9.4″ with both front and rear facing camera. Also packed inside the S1 will be a dual-core Tegra 2 chip from nVidia. If you own other Sony devices, you’ll be able to control them too thanks to the infrared system embedded into the tablet.
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The S2 will be a clam-shell tablet featuring dual-screens with each screen measuring in at 5.5″ and running at 1024×480 resolution. Packed inside will also be a dual-core Tegra 2 chip from nVidia to help you along with some gaming power. Sony’s UI will allow for a few interesting features but the one that we like the most are the game controllers that will be located on the lower screen with the game you are playing being on the upper screen.
Both tablets will be Playstation certified and have Qriocity installed on them as well. Both will also support DNLA, be WiFi/3G/4G compatible, and will be running Honeycomb. Originally it was suggested that we would see the S1 and S2 out sometime this Summer but it seems to be, according to Engadget, looking like a Fall release worldwide. Pricing is also rumored at around $599 for the S1 and $699 for the S2. At least by the time these two tablets are available, the PSN and Qriocity should be back online.
For those of you who are interested, you can read the official Sony Playstation release regarding the security failure of the Playstation Network over at the Playstation Blog.
Website Referenced: Engadget
