Sony has announced a temporary sales ban on it's new Xperia Tablet S citing the a slight manufacturing defect as the reason. We're not sure the issue is affecting all units but some devices are suffering from a gap between the display and the bodywork of the rest of the tablet.
This is obviously a rather large issue for a tablet which is advertised as splash proof! It's been reported that the issue stems from the Chinese manufacturing plant and Sony has promised to rectify it, although they currently haven't offered a time scale on when the issue will be fixed and the tablets will be rolling out again.
To their credit, the company has issued an apology and promised to start a free inspection programme. If your tablet is 'faulty' then you'll get a complementary repair too! At the moment there's 100,000 slates in the wild and we're not sure how many are affected.
Sony did say that they don't expect their revenue to be badly hit by the issue, so it may well be a case that only a couple of batches have gone out with the issue. Sony may have a made a big deal about it before it became a major issue, which is probably a smart move!
If we get any more details about particularly affected regions or batches we'll be sure to let you know!
Via Slashgear.