Detailed Review

Design:

Sony lovers in India were waiting for it for about eight months, since its launch in January in the USA. And Sony didn’t disappoint them. Sony Xperia ion is a premium smartphone with its impressive specs and hardware. When in hand, the first thing attracts you is its HD reality display on its big 4.6 inches screen. The reality display with Mobile Bravia engine gives massive pixels density and brilliant contrast.

Xperia ion comes in Black and Red Colours. The dimensions of this phone are 133mm, 68mm and 10.6mm in height, width and depth. The weight of this power packed phone is 144 gm. Its slim design and curvy edges makes this an eye candy phone. The display type of this phone is LED-backlit LCD, capacitive touch screen with 16 M colours and 1280 x 720 pixels screen resolution.

It has multi-touch screen with up to four fingers. For its screen protection it comes with a scratch resistance glass with shatter proof sheet on mineral glass. The built of this phone is strong and is a good hand held too. On its right depth are three physical keys, a power/lock key on upper side with volume key in the middle and a dedicated camera key below them. The left depth is given to USB/charging and HDMI port under a rubber flap. The 3.5 mm earjack is placed on the top whereas the bottom is left with mouthpiece only. Above the screen is a VGA camera with proximity and ambient light sensors. And below the screen are capacitive touch keys for Menu, Home, Back and search. The back panel offers you a 12 megapixels camera, LED flash and speaker grill. Above the main camera is a small removable cover that includes sim card slot and micro SD card holder. The overall design of Sony Xperia ion is great and the plastic body type is hard and strong too. The only drawback is its non removable battery.

Operating System/Interface:

The Sony Xperia ion runs on latest Android 4.0 Ice cream Sandwich (ICE) operating system. The interface is same as of the Xperia S. It is fast, smooth and can be personalized to your choice. It comes with a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm MSM8260 Snapdragon processor and massive 1 GB RAM. The browsing experience while testing the unit was a real fun and hassle free experience. You can easily download/purchase music, applications, games, etc. from the android market.

Memory:

Xperia ion comes inbuilt with 13.2 GB internal phone storage, out of which, up to 12.9 GB is user accessible memory. To add more memory space, it has a micro SD card slot for up to 32 GB and it supports 1 GB RAM for smooth functioning.

Camera:

The Xperia ion comes with a 12.1 megapixels main camera with auto focus, LED flash and photo light. It captures maximum image to 4000 x 3000 pixels and has 16x digital zoom. Xperia ion also has Sony’s Exmor R for mobile CMOS sensor. The camera features Geotagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, 3D sweep panorama and image stabilization. It captures HD video recording with 1080 pixels at 30 frames per second with continuous auto focus, video light and video stabilizer.
While testing camera showed great results on outdoor shoots comparing to indoor. The colours were rich and the display on HD screen was great. There is a front facing VGA camera for video calling, which gives HD video resolution of 720 pixels at 30 frames per second. The front camera work is fine but, in this price range Sony should have kept a minimum 2 megapixels camera for perfect results.

Audio/Video:

The audio quality of Xperia ion is sharp and clear. It comes with xLOUD technology of Sony that filters audio and enhances sound quality. Track ID for music recognition is also embedded in it. The sound gets better with its headphone and you get every beat crystal clear. It has in-built FM Radio with RDS technology that can be enjoyed with headphone on. The music player is same as of other Xperia series and is multifunctional. The audio playback, supported formats are: MP3, 3GPP, MP4, SMF, WAV, OTA and Ogg vorbis, whereas the audio recording supported formats are 3GPP, MP4 and AMR. The video quality of Xperia ion is brilliant as it is full HD phone and the 12.1 megapixels camera captures HD video recording with 1080 pixels at 30 frames per second with continuous auto focus, video light and video stabilizer. The video playback supported formats are: 3GPP, MP4, Matroska, AVI and WebM, whereas the video recording supported formats are 3GPP and MP4.

Features:

Sony Xperia ion is a fully loaded smartphone with all latest and popular features embedded in it. For connectivity and communication it gives you high speed 2.0 USB and micro USB support, Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi hotspot functionality, HDMI connectivity, DNLA technology to pair the device with supporting PC or Laptop. It has GPS with aGPS support and GLONASS. Webkit Web browser is also there. Bluetooth technology, native USB tethering, ANT + technology and on top of all it gives NFC tags.
Social networking Sites are also integrated for the latest posts and updates. For games lovers it has PlayStation certification, to give you experience like never before. The pre loaded applications in the phone are Google voice search, Google talk application, Google mail and Google maps with street view and latitude. For entertainment it gives you TV launcher, Sony Entertainment Network a complete package for Films, Music, audio, video, etc. but,  Sony Entertainment Network with Video Unlimited and Music Unlimited are not available in every market.

Battery:

The powerhouse Xperia ion comes with a standard LI-ion 1900 mAh battery. The battery is well supported for this phone and lasts long with average daily use. The Stand By time on 2G is up to 400 hours and up to 350 hours on 3G whereas, the Talk Time it delivers is up to 9 hours on 2G and up to 5 hours on 3G. The music playback time is up to 12 hours and video playback time is up to 3 hours. The overall battery performance is good.

Conclusion:

Sony’s first Ericsson free smartphone Xperia ion is an amazing phone with brilliant features and good design. It’s loaded with latest features and applications, power packed with 1GB RAM and 1.5 GHz Dual Core processor. But, in this price range it should have been Quad core instead of Dual core and the front camera should have been 2 megapixels instead of VGA. The battery life is good, display is wonderful and the 12.1 megapixels main camera is outstanding. We give this phone four and half star rating.

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