Sony may lag behind Samsung, ASUS and Amazon in the tablet market, but with the Sony Xperia Z2, they've put together one of the best Android tablets available. It has impressive stats that can put most Android competitors to shame and a sleek style that is almost reminiscent of Apple. But how does it compare to the king of tablets? We'll put the Sony Xperia Z2 tablet into a showdown against the iPad Air to see which tablet comes out ahead.

The iPad Air

Apple did something quite stunning with the iPad Air. They took the comfortable design of the iPad Mini, which thinned the bezel, allowing for a smaller tablet with more space taken up by the screen, and they combined it with one of the fastest and most impressive chipsets on the mobile market. The A7 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is the first mobile processor to go 64-bit, and while it is easy to dismiss the benefits of 64-bit architecture, it is not so easy to dismiss the iPad Air's benchmarks. It flew past the competition.

Beyond the fast 64-bit processor, the iPad's 2048x1536 "Retina Display" provides 264 pixels-per-inch for a super-sharp image. The 5.0 MP back-facing iSight camera is great for taking photo and video, while the 1.2 MP front-facing camera allows HD-quality for Facetime video conferencing.

But the iPad Air is more than just a fast tablet with a beautiful new design. It's an iPad. And it is an iPad experience that drives many people to the iPad Air. There are over one million apps in the Apple App Store, with over half designed for the larger screen of the iPad.

This means it is rare to download an app only to find it is sized more for a smartphone than a tablet.

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The Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet

Sony's new tablet is impressive. It's powered by a 2.3 GHz quad-core processor and has 3 GB of RAM. The 8.1-MP rear-facing camera is a rarity among tablets, with a picture quality as good as most smartphone cameras. The 1920x1200 resolution display isn't quite as sharp as the iPad Air's Retina Display, providing only 224 pixels-per-inch verses the iPad's 264, but for most, the difference in display quality will be barely noticeable.

While the new Xperia's processor would look to win the numbers war, with a 2.3 Ghz processor with four cores compared to the iPad Air's dual-core 1.4 Ghz processor, it's actually a good example of why these numbers can be so meaningless. In benchmarks, the two tablets perform very similar in multi-core tests, with the iPad actually clocking faster scores with just a single core.

One neat feature of the new Xperia tablet is support for the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard. While this standard is new enough that we are only now seeing routers appear that support it, this faster standard means a future upgrade to your router will also be an upgrade to the Xperia tablet.

Sony's tablet manages to pack in all of these great features into a very thin tablet, measuring just .27 of an inch thick. This is slightly thinner than the .30-inch thick iPad Air. This might sound like a trivial point, but the lighter and thinner the tablet, the more it will feel like you are holding a piece of paper rather than a tablet.

But despite a snappy processor, Sony's version of Android can be a little sluggish at times when navigating the user interface. This goes away when in apps, but for a fast tablet, it can be annoying to have a stutter in the interface. It is also loaded down with Sony-branded apps that might be useless for most people.

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Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet vs the iPad Air: The Winner

In a technical sense, the tablets are very similar, with Sony's tablet sporting a better camera and some neat features like an IR blaster and support for near field communications (NFC), and the iPad Air with a slight edge in the display. Both have about the same horsepower under the hood, and both have a sleek design that will feel good in your hand.

Price is usually a big advantage when it comes to Android tablets, with many with favorable technical specs weighing in at $100-$200 cheaper than an iPad Air. But the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet is priced similar to an iPad Air, which means consumers must weigh the experience of owning an Xperia Z2 tablet verses the iPad experience.

Android's biggest advantage is the open architecture, which makes it easy to load files onto the device or to modify it to suit the user's needs. This includes loading a totally different user interface for those who want to ditch the Sony experience. But the open architecture and the lack of monitoring in the Android marketplace also tend to work as a disadvantage. The Android experience can be disjointed, lagging in many areas.

For those craving that open architecture, the question isn't so much whether the Xperia Z2 beats out the iPad Air as it is whether Sony's tablet beats out the competition from Samsung, ASUS and Amazon. And it does. If you are willing to spend $500 on a tablet, the Xperia Z2 Tablet is about the best Android tablet on the market.

But for those debating between the Xperia Z2 Tablet and the iPad Air, the clear advantage goes to the iPad. You won't save any money buying Sony's new tablet, and in fact, you can elect to go with the iPad Mini 2 -- which is basically a 7.9-inch iPad Air -- and get it $100 cheaper than the Xperia Z2. There are over one million apps in the Apple App Store with about half that number designed specifically for the iPad. And each app goes through an approval process, unlike Google Play, where apps are automatically released with no testing by Google. The iPad also has a thriving accessory marketplace, which makes enhancing the iPad experience easy.

Android has come a long way in the past few years, but while it offers a lot of advantages to people who like to tweak their devices, it is still not on par with the iPad in creating a smooth easy-to-jump-into experience. Cheaper Android tablets like the Google Nexus 7 can use price to leverage that difference, but Sony's new tablet cannot. If you are on the fence, the easy choice is to go with the iPad Air.

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