Sony has launched its much-awaited Xperia Tablet Z at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, marking the arrival of the thinnest and lightest tablet produced by any hardware maker ever.

The tablet comes just six months after Sony's last Android slate, the Xperia Tablet S. Xperia Tablet Z is 0.27 inches thick and weighs just 1.09 pounds. Unveiling one of the loveliest Android tablets on the market, Sony has once again proved it can still design remarkable products.

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Tablet Z features a 10.1-inch display running at a hefty 1920 x 1200 resolution. The camera features stand apart from other tablets in the market, with the rear camera packing 8 megapixels that can shoot up to 1080p video and a front-facing 2.2-megapixel, 720p camera.

This is the first tablet to use Qualcomm's newest Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor, clocked at 1.5GHz and 2GB of RAM.

"It has an infrared port, which lets it serve as a universal remote, and TV SideView, a new version of Sony's fancy guide to TV shows available on cable, Netflix and other sources. Like most new Sony products, it uses NFC technology to enable the feature Sony calls One-touch: the ability to send music from the tablet to a One-touch speaker by tapping the two gadgets together," Harry McCracken of the Times writes of his hands-on experience with the device.

Taking a cue or two from its smartphone designs and features, Sony has decided to incorporate the straightforward black and angular design while borrowing its smartphone sibling's water-resistance feature. The device runs on Google's Android Jelly Bean 4.1 operating system.

Although no official release date has been announced, the Japanese consumer electronics major says the tablet will be available this spring at a price tag that resembles Apple's iPads — $499 for a 16GB Wi-Fi model and $599 for a 32GB version. Both the variants have MicroSD slots for memory expansion of up to 64GB.

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