Sony Tablet S vs HTC Puccini ~ GoAndroid

HTC's new 10-inch Pucinni, which isn't a variety of pizza, goes head-to-head with Sony's S Tablet

We take a look at HTC’s forthcoming 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet, the HTC Puccini (also known as the Jetstream), to see how it fares against Sony’s new Tablet S.

Form
HTC Puccini - 251x178x13mm, 709g
Sony Tablet S - 241.2x174.3x10.1-20.6mm (tapers), 598g
The HTC Flyer, the company’s first foray into tablet territory, was garish and unsightly, but it seems lessons have been learned as this newest device is a much more tasteful affair.
The bodywork is sleek, black and shiny and there’s very little border space around the screen – a look we feel works well more often than not.
HTC has also given the Puccini some visual interest with carbon fibre styling on the back panel, while the camera port is subtly integrated in the top corner.
Logos and motifs are also kept unobtrusive which helps the aesthetic considerably.
It’s quite a thick and heavy device though, but visually things are looking good.
Sony’s Tablet S is a little more unconventional as it’s an unusual wedge-shaped device starting at 20mm thick on the top edge and tapering to 10mm thin at the bottom.
The whole front panel of the device appears to curve elegantly over the top edge and round to the back in a continuous line, which is very appealing to the eye, while a textured surface helps things too.
As much as we like the Puccini and think it’s a massive step forward for HTC’s tablets, we also feel Sony’s styling is much more adventurous and that is something to be commended in our book.
Winner - Sony Tablet S

Display
HTC’s Puccini tablet has the larger display size of these two devices, with a 10.1-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen.
The Puccini’s resolution is WXGA at 1280x768 pixels and with a pixel density of 147 pixels-per-inch (ppi). Multi-touch and an accelerometer sensor are par for the course.
The Tablet S is only a bit smaller at 9.4-inches but it boasts a slightly higher resolution of 1280x800 pixels and subsequently a higher pixel density at 161ppi. It’s a TFT capacitive touchscreen display featuring multi-touch, accelerometer and gyro sensors.
The Tablet S's display might be a bit smaller but not by much and the higher resolution and pixel density will make a difference to image clarity. Sony wins this round.
Winner - Sony Tablet S

Storage
Sony’s Tablet S is the more diverse device when it comes to internal storage, with options for both 16GB and 32GB of onboard capacity.
It is, however, a little more limiting for external support with only SD cards catered for rather than the more common, and arguably more useful, micro SD.
External storage is still up to 32GB though which can only be a good thing.
The Puccini has only one fixed internal storage option at the S Tablet’s higher end of 32GB, it’s also got one-up on the Sony by supporting micro SD up to 32GB.
Both devices prop up their respective processors with 1GB of RAM storage.
There’s not much between these two as, at the higher end option for the Sony they’re both equal on internal storage, and in either case they’re even on RAM.
However, we prefer the micro SD support the Puccini brings and that closes the deal as far as we’re concerned.

Winner - HTC Puccini

Processor
We’re dealing with a couple of dual core monsters here: Sony’s offering packs a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor on Nvidia’s turbo-charged Tegra 2 T20 chipset.
Nvidia also provides the S tablets graphical prowess with a ULP Geforce graphics processing unit (GPU).
Against this HTC has brought something a bit special to the table, opting for Qualcomm technology with a 1.5GHz MSM8260 Scorpion backed up by an Adreno 220 GPU.
There’s no question that each of these tablets is a heavy hitter, easily capable of delivering consistently fast performance in pretty much any tablety task you put them to.
However, that extra half a gig of clock speed on the HTC will certainly make a noticeable difference running Android, which benefits significantly from a more heavy handed approach to processing power.
Winner - HTC Puccini

Operating System
Both tablets run on Google’s Android platform and they’re each sensibly using the tablet specific Honeycomb build.
We’re rather fond of Honeycomb, of course there’s always room for improvement but we feel it certainly made Android a more complete and well-rounded system, at least in terms of what we expect at the most basic level of functionality these days.
It ironed out a lot of the kinks present in previous builds and means everything runs much smoother.
The interface has also had a few intuitive tweaks which make things much easier to use – a new app tray, much like the ones provided by third party launchers, makes switching between apps a breeze.
Multi-tasking never gets left out in the cold on Android and it’s as good as its ever been on Honeycomb.
There’s also all the perks from Gingerbread’s enhanced app management suite and system auto-management facilities, so you not only do you have total hands-on control but if your attention is elsewhere you need never worry about system resources getting hogged.
Android’s much-mimicked notifications bar has returned with a bit of a facelift, this time it shows more detailed text information for each alert as well as displaying relevant pictures so you know exactly what it’s talking about.
All in all it’s the best Android build to date and performance is top-notch on dual core processors such as the ones found here.
Winner - Draw

Camera
The Tablet S is fitted with a 5-megapixel primary at 2560х1920 pixels, plus a VGA secondary. Video capture is 720p and video calling is supported.
Features include autofocus, touch focus, image stabilisation and face and smile detection.
With the Puccini you’ve got a much more impressive setup: the primary camera comes in at 8-megapixels and a 3264x2448 pixel resolution while the secondary is also considerably better than its rival at 1.3-megapixels.
Video capture is also higher quality with 1080p capability and like its opponent the Puccini also supports video calls.
The standard autofocus and geo-tagging are on board along with a dual-LED flash.
Clearly HTC’s Puccini tablet is better equipped when it comes to snapping pics on the go.
Winner - HTC Puccini

Final Thoughts
We really like Sony’s Tablet S but it’s very much outclassed by the HTC on paper and actually that’s a situation we’re more than happy with.
We’re glad to see HTC has upped its game from the frankly disappointing HTC Flyer to offer a much more competent piece of hardware this time round.