I wanted to tell you about the Sony Xperia Z2 tablet. I had this idea to toss my phones for the weekend, close up the laptop and show you how you can live on a tablet alone. But who actually wants to live on a tablet alone? What I want from a gadget is one that effortlessly fits into my life (and, ideally, my handbag). It needs to get along and work hand in hand with all the other tech I’m carrying with me.
I’ve had a few tablets for review and three of my own. My biggest issue is that they’re not your primary device so they spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for you to need them. I’d get so annoyed because every time I picked one up the battery would be flat or close to. The Z2 doesn’t give you this problem. The battery life is incredible. I find I’m only charging it once or twice a week. Which suits me perfectly.
It’s a decent size: 172 x 266 x 6.4 mm and offering up a 10.1″ display. I liked the size, it was big enough that it didn’t start looking a bit like my phablet but also thin and light enough (it weighs less than 500 grams) to casually slip in to my day time handbag. I found it most useful on my recent trip to San Francisco for Intel. You’ve got to understand we were shuttled out of the hotel at 8 or 9am every morning and then had a full schedule for the day. We returned to the hotel at around 9pm. I was constantly tweeting, taking Instagram shots, checking emails and trying to get content up on the site. Also, being the idiot I am, I only took one adapter with me, meaning I could only charge one device at a time. Grrrreat.
I’d pop the Xperia Z2 tablet in my handbag each morning along with my two smartphones and leave my little laptop on charge. Any down time (and by down time I mean riding in our bus from one spot to the other) would be spent checking and responding to emails as well as writing the basic layout for blog posts I’d need to get done that evening. I usually hate typing on a touch screen but the size of the Xperia makes all the difference. I could then happily travel around Silicon Valley all day without my shoulder aching from a heavy bag before heading back to my hotel to publish the day’s content, usually with a rough draft that would require some tweaking on the laptop and then it was ready to go. My system allowed me to get an extra hour or two in bed each evening…. and who doesn’t like sleeping?
Since the trip I use my tablet in the evenings to catch up on social media and read my favourite books via the Kindle app. I also committed the cardinal sin and took it out to take photos with it for a personal blog post about fashion bloggers. I’ve also told you how I now use it to record my showjumping videos.
In 3 weeks the Sony Xperia Z2 tablet has fitted rather neatly into my life. So neatly in fact that I didn’t realise how much it had changed my gadget handling habits. That’s the mark of a good piece of tech. It fits seeminglessly into your life but you’d best know you’d notice if it wasn’t there.