Tag Archives: xperia

Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet with touch screen problems

Last week I decided to buy a tablet with Android. After looking a while I decided to go with the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet, which in my opinion is an awesome tablet. It is powerful, light, high quality finish, even waterproof and incredibly thin. Being definitely in a high price range, this is a professional tablet, which cost me roughly 420 EUR.

Only after buying and using it at home for a while, I occasionally experienced erratic touch screen behaviour. Touches would be not recognized, sometimes swipe gestures would be detected as taps, multitouch gestures would stop and break in the middle and sometimes middle touches would only be detected, if pressed very hard. And even then the touches would not be detected reliably, resulting in random taps, performing undesired actions. This is usually with the tablet laying on a flat surface, quite often over night. I know that electric fields while charging a device quite often disturb the touch screen, but with the Sony Xperia Z2 this happened without the charger connected. I had the latest available software installed, the 17.1.1.A.0.402, which obviously did not fix the issue.

Turning the screen off and on usually fixed the situation temporarily, but that is not a solution as it would randomly happen again.

I downloaded a touchscreen test app and also found that the tablet has a very hard time recognizing touches, when two fingers are exactly in a horizontal or vertical line. It would simple drop both fingers. This is not acceptable multitouch behaviour, where one touch affects the other.

Confused I searched the Internet and found quite some people reporting the same issue, even a YouTube video demonstrating the problem, making me believe this is a systematic design flaw, not just a flawed device:

Sony Support recommended me to install the latest software (this was already the case) and then said, my device might need repair. This issue has apparently been around since several month and still Sony did not confirm the problem.

But I believe my device wasn’t actually broken but suffered from design flaws, I returned it for a refund. I am not willing to try different devices until I find one that actually works. Not with so many people complaining about the touch screen. Not for this price.

Sorry, Sony, you made the Xperia Z2 Tablet too thin and you have problems to get it to work properly. I’m sorry my first experience with a Sony mobile device had to be a negative one and with this issue not even publicly confirmed, I can’t recommend buying it. Too bad, it could have been such an awesome tablet.