I highly recommend the Sony Z2 tablet.

I highly recommend the Sony Z2 tablet. Yes, I work for Sony, but this is an honest review. I have no contact with the Sony Mobile division, so this review has no insider details at all.

I got this tablet mid-summer, and I’ve found myself using more often than my iMac for day-to-day activities around the house. It’s delightfully thin and weighs about the same as by 1st-gen Nexus 7, despite being a much larger screen. With Kitkat it’s very fast. I’m expecting it will get Lollipop, but that’s just my personal speculation based on past updates and I don’t believe Sony has promised anything concrete.

The Sony tweaks to Android are fairly minor, so it feels almost stock. A couple of them I actually prefer, like the screen rotation fade-in instead of animation. I haven’t made heavy use of the Sony-specific apps (like Walkman) because my other Android devices are non-Sony, and I’ve gotten used to Google Music.

The screen is really beautiful. I turned off the “X-Reality” feature because I found that it exaggerated colors unnecessarily. When I go back to my Nexus 7 or my Moto X, the colors look flat. The sound is also quite good. I sometimes just play music from the tablet instead of going across the room to the iMac.

I also appreciate the waterproofing because this tablet spends a lot of time in the kitchen. Having to uncover the USB power jack each time is a tiny hassle, but not as annoying as I feared. The only drawback is I sometimes open the adjacent SDCard cover by mistake instead and the OS warns me about card removal. But that’s only happened a couple times.

The multi-user features of Android 4 have been useful. The kids each have their own user so they don’t collide with my data/apps.

http://www.sonymobile.com/us/products/tablets/xperia-z2-tablet/