The 9.4-inch Sony tablet is available in all of China

Sep 23, 2011 11:48 GMT  ·  By

Sony's Tablet S is slowly but surely making its entrance into the retail market, and China is one of the fist countries to get this new slate designed to run the 3.1 version, also known as Honeycomb, of Google's Android mobile operating system.

In China, the Sony Tablet S is now available from two brick and mortar retailers in Shanghai as well as online for delivery all over the country.

Pricing has been set at RMB 3,688 ($575 or 424 Euro) for the 16GB version and RMB 4,488 ($700USD or 517 Euro) for the 32GB model. These are the prices for the Wi-Fi only version of the tablet as the 3G edition wasn't announced in China.

We had the chance of going hands-on with Sony's Tablet S during the IFA 2011 fair that took place in Berlin at the beginning of September, and while we were impressed with the build quality and performance of the device, the retail prices seemed more than a bit too high for our liking.

As far as the specs of the tablet are concerned, like many other Honeycomb devices before it, the Tablet S is powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC (system-on-a-chip), which includes a pair of Cortex A9 ARM cores clocked at 1GHz as well as a GeForce graphics unit.

The rest of the specifications list includes a 5MP rear and a 0.3MP front facing camera, a full size SD card slot, Bluetooth 2.1 and 802.11 b/g/n wireless connectivity with DLNA support, as well as 1GB of internal memory and a non-removable Li-Ion 5000mAh battery.

The screen measures 9.4-inch in diagonal and it sports a native resolution of 1280x800 pixels.

In the US, the Tablet S is only available through the Home Shopping Network (HSN), which sells the 16GB, WiFi-only version for $599.99 (about 443 Euro), which is actually $100 more than the what Sony has it on pre-order for on the company's US website. (via Netbook News)