Report: Sony Plans Xperia Tablet With Surface-like Keyboard Cover

Here come the imitators.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Right now tablet manufacturers everywhere are scrambling to produce prototypes of something that looks like Microsoft Surface, the anticipated tablet the Windows-maker showed off in June. You could have intuited that based simply on the fact that good innovations in technology are always copied, but now we have hard proof thanks to leaked photos from Sony obtained by the German website Mobiflip.

The photos show that Sony is planning a new tablet that will bear the Xperia brand and borrow Surface's much celebrated keyboard cover accessory. Though Sony's keyboard cover will be sold separately from the tablet itself (for a reported $99), internal slides show that they will be pitched as one unit, similar to what Microsoft did at its Surface announcement.

"Important for us to showcase tablet with keyboard case at retail to boost attach rates," one slide says.

The Xperia tablet will likely be Sony's follow-up to the less-than-rapturously received Tablet S. It's reported stats include a beefy quad-core Tegra 3 processor, 16, 32 or 64 GB of storage, 3G data and Android 4.0 or later. The 16 GB model will start at $449, with the price increasing by $100 for each additional 16 GB of storage. No word yet on a release date.

[via The Verge]

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