Sony announces jumbo Nintendo DS tablet

 Europe’s largest consumer electronics expo, IFA 2011, is just about to kick off in Berlin. Sony new tab called S (slate) and P (portable) tablets,Price- and availability-wise, the Sony S 16GB will be $499, and 32GB will be $599 — the same as the iPad 2 — and it doesn’t sound like it will be a carrier exclusive. The Sony P doesn’t have a US release date yet (and it will be an AT&T exclusive), but it should be available in Europe for around 500 euros in November.

Spec-wise, the Sony tablets sport dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 CPUs clocked at 1GHz — and judging by some benchmarks, they are certainly not the fastest tablets on the block. The Galaxy Tab 7.7 has a 1.4GHz dual-core Cortex-A9-based Exynos 4210 SoC — a faster version of the chip found in the Galaxy S II smartphone — which should be very fast indeed. All three tablets have 1GB of RAM and plenty of expandable, non-volatile flash storage, 3G (HSPA+) connectivity, and they all run Android 3 Honeycomb (with highly customized interfaces). Both the Sony S and P are PlayStation-certified, too, meaning it can play PS games like the Xperia Play — but neither device has hardware gamepad buttons, so…Design-wise, it is Sony that — as always — is pushing the boat out with some interesting and unconventional shapes and use-cases. The S tablet at first glance is just a standard me-too iPad killer — but you’ll notice in the image below that it’s actually curved along one horizontal side. Apparently this is to mimic the feel of a folded magazine or newspaper, a shape and weight distribution that is easier to hold with one hand. Having one raised edge will mean that it can prop itself up on a flat surface, too. The P tablet, of all things, is a clamshell with two 5.5-inch 1024×480 screens (view larger); kind of like a jumbo Nintendo DS. Just like clamshell phones of yesteryear, this rather odd form factor will allow the P to go where no other tablet has gone before: the jacket pocket and the purse. The Sony S, incidentally, has a 9.4-inch screen at 1280×768; higher resolution than the iPad 2.