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If the recent Android offerings from Korea and Taiwan didn’t catch your fancy, perhaps the newest flagship from the land of the rising sun will. Sony on Wednesday unveiled a range of smartphones for the region, with the new Xperia ion standing at its vanguard.
The Xperia ion is as different in aesthetics from the Galaxy S III as the Galaxy S III is from the One X, and more choices can only be a good thing for consumers. It has a very comfortable-to-hold curved back, and a combination of brushed metal and soft plastic construction which feels very nice to the touch.
However, the Xperia ion’s hardware is weaker compared to the other two powerhouses, with “only” a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor.
But a lesser number of cores shouldn’t concern most people if software still performs smoothly, and the phone has plenty of other features to pull away our attention.
The 12-megapixel camera, for instance, is fast and sharp. While it’s no Nokia PureView, the camera features Sony’s “Exmor R” technology, which promises better shots in low light. It’s extremely speedy, too. Just press and hold the camera button while the phone is in sleep mode and it will wake up and immediately take a shot, regardless of whether you’ve got your subject framed!
However, I find the colours of the photos a bit overly saturated. But there are lots of other extras to be happy about, including face detection, image stabiliser, sweep panorama, scene recognition modes, and full HD video recording.
Part of the reason why photos look so good on the Xperia ion is because of the large 4.6-inch mobile BRAVIA display (1,280 x 720), which borrows tech from Sony’s line of televisions.
Other specs include 16GB of storage expandable via micro SD, and 1GB of RAM.
The Ice Cream Sandwich phone will be available here in the third quarter of this year. For some reason, we’re only getting the black colour, while our Malaysian and Indonesian neighbours get the cool deep red colour as well.
Besides the Xperia ion, Sony also unveiled a bevy of new entry-level smartphones for the region,among them the Xperia miro and tipo.
Sony isn’t talking prices yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as they do.
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