Sony Xperia Tablet leaks: Tegra 3 SoC, Surface-style keyboard case, starts at $449.99
The successor to the Sony Tablet S has been leaked through what seem to be internal slides on German news site Mobiflip. The slides reveal a thinner, lighter, and more powerful tablet that refines the Tablet S' folded-magazine aesthetic.
Context & Ripple Effects
Sony's first Android slate arrived as the Tablet S in September 2011, but demand was soft enough that by January 2012 Sony had taken a $100 price cut to $400 for the 16GB model. The leaked Mobiflip slides now show a successor that resets the entry price upward to $449.99 while moving to NVIDIA's Tegra 3 — a bet that a thinner, faster design can command more than the discounted original did.
The timing matters on two fronts: Microsoft put a keyboard-integrated tablet on the map with its Surface unveiling just weeks earlier, and Sony itself has spent mid-2012 climbing upmarket rather than down — entering ultrabooks with the Vaio T in June after staying out of the low-cost PC race. A Surface-style keyboard case on the Xperia Tablet fits that premium posture.
First-order effects
- Sony would be launching its Tablet S successor at $449.99 — $50 above where the original settled after its January discount — asking buyers to pay more for the brand's second attempt.
- NVIDIA picks up another marquee Tegra 3 design win, putting the Xperia Tablet in direct silicon competition with other flagship Android slates of 2012.
Second-order effects
- A keyboard-case accessory shifts Sony's tablet economics toward attach-rate revenue, mirroring the Surface playbook Microsoft introduced in June 2012 and pressuring rivals like Asus and Acer, whose Transformer-style docks were their differentiator, to defend that territory.
- If the $449.99 price holds, Sony cedes the sub-$400 Android tier to Amazon's Kindle Fire and discounted first-gen hardware, narrowing its addressable market to premium buyers already courted by Apple's iPad.
Third-order effects
- The keyboard-dock pattern spreading from Asus through Microsoft to Sony points toward tablets and laptops converging into a single hybrid category, eroding the boundary that defined both product lines through 2012.
- For Android tablet makers generally, repeated premium launches against iPad pricing test whether any non-Apple vendor can sustain margins at the top of the Android slate market or whether the segment collapses toward cheap media devices.
The trend: Android tablet makers are converging on keyboard-equipped, laptop-replacement designs as the only defensible ground against both the iPad and the collapsing prices of commodity slates.