I'm sorry, but I find this pretty dissatisfying. The "tap to drop down" is a significantly worse user-interface than Android's traditional "swipe down to drop down".
The notification bar itself is a very narrow tap target and it doesn't really make sense for it to react to touch. Having application buttons near the top of the screen and the notification bar tap-target at the top of the screen makes it harder to distinguish between the two. Every time I slightly miss a button at the top of the screen, the notification bar ends up falling down. Normally buttons near the screen edges are very easy targets because there is nothing else to confuse them with. You can do sloppy taps (which are faster for humans than precise taps).
Having distinct gestures (swipe the notification bar vs tapping application buttons) makes it really easy to distinguish between the two and prevents accidentally doing one when you meant to do the other.
Separately, if you try to drag the notification bar back up to the top after just pulling it down a little (to see the date for instance), then if your finger happens to touch the top of the screen, the notification try will fall down again! That's clearly not what I wanted! Requiring that much precision on a swipe action is really undesirable.
In the next software release the Xperia team should strongly consider returning to the standard Android functionality of swipe-to-pull-down instead of tap-to-pull-down. This seems like a case of Sony going out of their way to change the software for the worse! In what way is the tap functionality better than the swipe? Why was this done?
What would we need to do to get Sony to give us the option of returning to the standard functionality?
