topic Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement? in General chat

Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 15:51:08 GMT

Hello All

As Sony is marketing the Xperia Z4 Tablet as a laptop replacement, my aim is to find out if this is true. So the question remains: In real life, is the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet a laptop replacement?

Upon delivery this morning of my new Xperia Z4 Tablet - LTE (Pics below), I have locked my laptop in a safe and have disposed of this safe in the middle of the North Sea. Sorry to all the greens out there, but it was a Samsung laptop after all. Any way, I will be using my Z4 Tablet as my only use of productivity at home and will blog my results in this thread.

Unboxing Pictures:

Upon unboxing the Z4 tablet, I opened the flap at the top of the tablet and inserted my EE nano Sim card that I already obtained and a 128GB Lexar class 10 micro SD card and turned on the tablet. Setting it up was a breeze especially changing the default language from German to English (UK).

I amd not going to do a review of the tablet, there are many out there on the internet and besides, my aim is for real world use. However I would like to say that this tablet really is light! After testing the Levovo Thinkpad 10 Tablet for work, this Z4 is 3 times lighter and lying down on the couch for a bit didnt cause me discomfort, unlike thr Lenovo.

Anyway, the 3 pictures above was taken from a non-networked camera. My first hurdle was getting those files tranferred to the tablet. Luckily enough my network media player accepts standard SD Cards. The problem was that for some reason Android is blocking me from directly transferring from my media player to the 128GB SD Card. So I had to relent and move the pics to the internal memory. A quick crop of a couple of the pics using the image editor that is provided on the tablet and all done.

I started typing this post but the predictive text always does my head in. I have never seemed to have learnt to use predictive text of guesture inputting, but a quick stop to the keyboard settings and I can type. Using the tablet in landscape mode, my typing speed is actually pretty good and unexpected.

One little known inbuilt feature/app is that a Sat Nav application is provided by Garmin - Xperia Edition. When first running the app, it does require an almost 1GB update plus another 300MB for the UK maps. I had a laugh on the disclaimer thought, saying not to use it whilst driving. Umm, thats the whole point of a Sat Nav isnt it??

MS Office is included, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. Unfortunately you cannot save files directly to the tablet, so my sign in for MS cloud services. Will test this out more another time.

Anyhow, its time to load some of my favourite apps and Candy Crush.

Bye for now

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 17:41:11 GMT

Ok, been trying to transfer some photos from a Sony E3 mobile via NFC, being my first time using NFC instead of merely playing, I couldnt work out how to do it. I think i paired both devices, but then what? So back to trusty of bluetooth as at least i know what i am doing with that!

Normally I would just plug a usb cable from phone to laptop. But still, i did manage to tranfer some photos.

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

jumpsuit — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 08:14:05 GMT

Nice looking tablet! @Anonymous

Any chance of a couple of photos of it powered up? (Like display etc?)

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 12:07:50 GMT

I think I can do that!

I'll post back with more photos tonight

Oh, 4G LTE works. Thats what I am using posting this now.

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 19:03:58 GMT

Nooooooo I have just lost everything I have written here, in an attempt to add some html code for some pictures 😞 looks like I have to re-write it all.....

Day 2

-------

For some reason I have lost all text formatting abilities when replying in this thread. Cleared cache, rebooted tablet to no effect. When creating a thread I have text formatting abilities and it was working yesterday!! This now means that I also cannot insert images to this post either. Will upload to an image host instead for the time being. EDIT: ITS BACK!

I have recieved the SCR32 Style cover today. It looks the part and functions as it should, but at almost £40 + delivery, its a little too pricey (twice the cost as it should in my opinion)

Last night I transferred some decent quality flac files and was playing some music during my lunch break today. Its loud enough for the purpose - which is louder than my phone and plays well.

Anyhow, below are some photos. As I only have a cheap camera, the photos dont quite do it justice. I have also start customising the home screens, so not quite looking out of the box now but you will get the idea.

A couple of screenshots of Word and Excell

Lastly but not least, Sony's Support page for the Z4 in updating the tablets firmware, list this as a phone -a cut and paste 'oops' moment?

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 18:35:34 GMT

Day 3

-----------

I am still having problems posting to this forum via the Z4 tablet. Same issue as yesterday, i have no text formatting options! But I did find a work around yesterday and it does work. I post a dummy reply, then edit my post, and low and behold, text formatting toolbar comes back. Its not just the toolbar missing, as when i submit a post, it looses all paragraphs. Meaning no 'carriage return'

Anyhow, I needed to type a short letter this afternoon, so fired up MS Word. I was wrong, you can save files directly to the tablet. Upon saving to my 128GB SD Card, Word crashes. Luckily enough, it does recover the 'lost' file. Saved the file to the device itself and all is fine. Tried a couple more tests on saving to 'sdcard1' and bombs out again. Bug that needs reporting I guess, as it is repeatable. Oh it did take me a couple of mintues to figure out how to remove line spacing !

So letter all typed up and now need to print. I have an Epson Sx435 printer, which is wireless. Going to the settings screen of the tablet and installing a printer service. This took me to the play store webpage of which i pressed [Install]. It did say that that the service will install shortly, however the play store indicated it was installed and the printer service saying 'no printer service'. So impatient me, i installed it again, this time it allowed me to 'activate' printer service.

Tested this on a short email, and it works. Upon printing via Word, it wants to upload my file to the cloud in order to print, see screenshot

Not thrilled on this, I thought id disable the printing service and install Epsons dedicated iPrint software, again, it too wants to upload my file to the cloud, this time googles servers - to convert my docx file to PDF. Not thrilled on this, as I should not have to use 'the cloud' to print directly over my home network. But such is life I guess. This is why 'Google knows everything' !!!!!

Letter printed anyhow.

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 18:32:43 GMT

Day 5

----------

Ok, I have just hit my first hurdle as a laptop replacment. I needed to use MS Live Meeting, i was already previously aware that Micro$oft have not produced a client for the Android OS. However they do provide a web based front end, and thought that would work. Unfortunatley it did not.

In true MS style, the error message (below) does not refer to the actual problem.

Thinking that the details i received were incorrect, I asked for them again, which produced the same results.

Next was to hit google, after all Google knows everything right? After a few wrong turns, I came across this support page after a few minutes. It has a 'compatibility test'

Upon doing this test, gives me the true reason it does not work. It requires Java!

Unfortunately one cannot install Java onto Android systems. Please correct me if I am wrong anyone, as I would love to be proven wrong with a working work-around.

Needless to say, I missed the meeting as I could not join.

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Jul 2015 17:46:11 GMT

After 2 Weeks

So how am I getting on after 2 weeks of only using this tablet as my source of functioning (i.e. no laptop). Absolutley brilliantly to be honest. Other than the Live Meeting, I have not needed to use my laptop at all. Which thankfully is good, as after all, it is sleeping with the fishes

My main anoyance has been adverts!!! All the adware crap on googles playstore – yes much of it is free ( to a point) however the insertation of popup ads is quite frankly #*?!ed. It has let me to delete countless apps and games and to search for something similar – and better. An app called ‘system’ was installed, I thought this was an update – however after much frustration of full window video ads randomly playing, I eventually traced it back to this app via another spp called ‘SeCore Antivirus’.

I received the much promised firmware update yesterday – The tablet appears to operating cooler now, of which it was running quite warm/hot before that. It still does warm up playing graphic intensive games or high cpu load apps, but not what it was before … so far.

On a usability note, I like to have my screen quite bright, which the Z4 Tablet can do. However the trade off is that the battery drains quite fast – faster than what I would have liked to be honest. So have to turn brightness down a bit to get longer battery life.

At this moment in time, my internet connection has gone down – a fault has now been reported to BT. Without the LTE version, I would be quite stuck. So thumbs for the Z4 again 

Now to type out an email that I have been procrastinating for a week.

Toodle do.

Re: Xperia Z4 Tablet - Is it a Laptop Replacement?

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 20:26:54 GMT

A couple of points that I should add.

I have found that the "File Commander" app very very slow in transferring large files to and from the table over my wifi network. So i tried another app called "File Manager" with no improvement. So in dispare, I tried various file managers, and the one that actually does tranfer files over my network at reasonable speeds is "ES File Explorer"

Another handy app is "Clean Music" -it does what it says on the tin, plays music without all the pretty pictures. I dont need to look at album cover art etc, just play music.

Now the only thing missing is those plastic screen protectors - gotta find me some, as im scared of scratching the screen!!