They've been focusing on being open on the mobile front for several years now. I'm still waiting for them to drop their horrible skins and move to stock android. Or at least make the skins optional. The Z#c line-up is, imo, in a class of it's own. It's nice to have a phone that's actually small, light, with a great camera, and amazing battery life. If only they'd ditch the skin!
In my opinion the skin is the most subtle variation of skins around. It's almost stock. It looks professional and nice in the same way it did when stock android didn't used to.
Any comments on Sony's tablet line-up? I'm looking for a replacement for my now EOL Nexus 7 (2012 edition) tablet and looking for one in the 8-9 inch category, mainly for off-line reading (ePUB files) and web browsing.
My main requirement is an OS that is getting updates on a semi-regular basis.
A 2013 N7 (though that's losing support very soon), a NVidia tablet (the newest one is a great performer, only $200), Asus ZenPad S 8 (or whatever it is -- the 2GB RAM variant is great for the price, though updates are iffy). The Nexus 9 gets updates, but its performance isn't the best, and people say the build is very bendy.
Thanks. I forgot to mention that I live in Singapore. So getting the NVIDIA tablet or the Nexus 9 locally is difficult (no direct distributor).
I may take a look at the Asus ZenPad.
Haven't really spent much time looking into their tablets. Although if it were me, and you just want to use it for reading and web browsing, I'd have a tough time not recommending an Amazon Fire Tablet.
Unfortunately, that is not possible. I live in Singapore and Amazon does not sell their tablets here.
Ever since they split from Ericsson they've been hewing a progressively better and better path. They have had a supported unlock mechanism for the bootloader for several years, they've been dropping bits of their drive trees into repos, and for the Z-series phones they're supporting upgrades for a decent-by-the-shitty-standards-of-Android length of time.