The new Sony Xperia Tablet Z: lo and behold it’s thinner than the iPad

Steve Jobs may have coined the “thinner and lighter” idea and pushed extensively for it in the quest for perfection, but Sony it seems has decided to take it a little further. The new Xperia Tablet Z is the thinnest 10 inch tablet yet at 6.9mm thick (or lack thereof), according to Sony mobile’s Japan-based blog (translated) dealing with mobile communications-related topics. That tops the previous catwalk anorexic tablet, the iPad mini, by just 0.3mm.

Another first Sony is trying to strengthen the tablet with is the 8.1 megapixel camera, the first backside-illuminated sensor it’s put in a tablet. While most will tell you that you look like… well like a dork while taking pictures with a huge 10-inch tablet, be sure that Sony will use this as a big selling point. The rest of the specs though are actually what needs to be looked at.

Even at 6.9mm Sony have managed to squeeze quite a lot into this slab. Running on Android 4.1 with a 1920 x 1200 display, it is powered by a 6000mAh lithium polymer battery and gets its speed from a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 2GB RAM. The display will be 1920 x 1200 pixels and will run on Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine 2 technology, so expect it to be pretty damn good even though it’s not the most dense we have seen. Onboard memory capacity will be the usual 32 or 64GB, with an SD card slot to expand the memory.

It will also support LTE and NFC, and Sony says it will be released in the Japanese market later this year.

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