Android has always been my second choice to iOS. I find Android equally good as iOS or even better when it comes to customisability and a few other advanced features. But I never used an Android device as my primary device for a long period. I remember the time when I tried switching to a Galaxy SII and Galaxy Note. But it didn’t workout well. I give a lot of importance to the quality of things I use. And that’s exactly where me and Android couldn’t work things out. So we broke up. There are plenty of Android manufacturers out there in the market. I’ve lost the count. You can get Android devices at any price range. An Android device running Ice Cream Sandwich with decent hardware is now available for as low as $200. Its a good thing. But the problem is when you go high end. Even when you pay prices as high as $600-700 what you get is almost the same. Of course, there’s a bump in the hardware packaging, but there isn’t much leap forward in terms of style and build quality. I think people tend to consider all these things as we climb up the price range. We won’t be ready to compromise much at this price point. Besides, we need a differentiation. That’s why we shell out more. Same was the case with me. I wanted a device with great build quality, impressive design and performance. Although, Galaxy SII and Galaxy Note gave me the performance boost I wanted, they failed to give me the quality I wished for. That’s when I came across the announcement of the Sony branded phones. Yes, they make phones of their own now. Ericsson is no more a part of it. I saw the Xperia ION on the website and was seriously impressed with the device. It had the style I wanted, build quality looked great and the hardware was great too. So, here, check out my full review below.
Box Package:
The Xperia ION comes in slim but big package. It doesn’t follow the current style of packaging that others follow. It’s not something one should worry about anyway. The box package contains the smartphone, a microUSB data cable, a power adaptor and in-ear microphones. You’ll also find a lot manuals in many different languages that you can’t speak. Don’t worry, English manual is also included although you wouldn’t really need one to set up your phone. Sony suggests that you charge your phone at least 30minutes before using it for the first time. I would recommend a straight 2 hours charge though.
Design:
Sony’s Xperia 2012 line up has got one of the best designs of all time. I really liked the look and feel of the device in hand. And as I mentioned earlier, this is the design and quality I’ve been expecting from a high end Android device. The front side of the phone is mostly the display. Its LED backlit and measures 4.55 inches. Sony also claims it to be scratch resistant. I dare you not challenge it. You’ll also notice the front facing camera and the Sony branding on top. Towards the bottom, you’ll find the default Android soft buttons like Menu, Home Back and Search. These days most Android phones only have 3 soft buttons including its little brother Xperia S. This, however, came with four.
The top of the phone is clean with just one 3.5mm headphone jack. The power button, volume buttons and the dedicated camera button are located on the right side of the phone. The volume buttons looks a bit smaller than usual. On the left side we have the microUSB port and the micro HDMI port. They are covered with a small plastic cover so that they don’t collect dust or other particles when not in use. Its a little hassle to remove it each time when you want to charge your phone as the phone also charges through the same microUSB port. At the bottom of the phone, you’ll find nothing more than a tiny microphone. And at the back of the phone, you’ll see an aluminium casing which gives slight brushed metal look. There’s a 12MP camera on the back. Right below it you’ll notice the LED flashlight and the speaker. Towards the bottom, you’ll find the Sony Ericsson logo which is a bit confusing as Ericsson is no longer a part of Sony Mobile.
The phone feels really good in hands. In fact, it feels much better than the Xperia S which has plastic casing at the back. The aluminium casing at the back gives it a premium feel in hand. And the way they’ve designed the back is also very appealing. Its hard for someone to be unnoticed when someone walks by with this phone. It definitely is an eye turner and drool worthy. The only problem is that, Sony is making a lot of variant of these designs like Samsung did with the Galaxy. So sometimes you may feel inferior when a lower priced device looks almost the same as yours. Also this causes confusion to a lot of consumers.
Display:
One of the eye catching features of the Xperia ION is the dazzling display. It features the Sony Mobile Bravia Engine which can be assumed as the little brother of the original Bravia display seen on their range of TVs. The Bravia Mobile technology is a stand out display technology and looks amazing on this huge 4.55 inch display. With 720×1280 resolution, there’s nothing more you can ask more from this department. Pictures and videos look so amazing. I love watching videos on this display. Its so vivid and lovely. If you watch a lot of videos on the phone including movies and those from the internet, this huge screen and the Mobile Bravia Engine is going to be really useful to you. Photos look great too. With this level of clarity on the display, even the minute detail in the photo are very visible. And when you browse the internet and read tonnes of content from various websites, you’ll really thank the inclusion of 323ppi. That’s close to the Retina Display on iPhone. Reading the sharp non fuzzy text is something you can’t get tired of. I don’t usually read on small screens but I found this 4.5 inch display comfortable enough. It had the clarity and quality I wanted. And the size of the screen wasn’t too small or too big as far as reading was concerned. Plus, with Apps like Amazon Kindle, Instapaper, Flipboard and Pocket, you get a fine reading experience on the phone.
While the display quality did quite well, there were a few hiccups with it as well. The display is glossy which means you’ll see a lot of yourself on the display when you try to look at it in the sunlight. Its sometimes very annoying as you can’t concentrate on what’s on the screen. However, you can correct it to a good extend by turning on the backlight using the widgets or from the display menu under settings. But if you still find it difficult, you may just have to deal with it. Another problem, I’ve confronted with the display is that it attracts finger prints and smudges very well. There isn’t a oleo phobic coating on the Xperia ion which usually prevents the finger prints to some extend. The smudges and finger prints are notable only when the display is off. They never cause a problem when the display is on. And its not any serious problem that a soft cloth can’t solve. But its worth noting though. Sony also has a scratch resistant film on the screen. The phone ships with the film by default and it’s hardly noticeable. It’s a good addition it can prevent direct scratches on the screen to a great extend.
In short, the display is really great. It serves well for videos, web browsing and regular reading. And the Mobile Bravia Engine really lives up to the name.
Camera:
When its a phone from Sony, you really look forward to the Camera of the phone. Sony was an often spoken name in the past when it came to camera phones. It looks like they still have got the magic. The camera on the Xperia ion delivered great quality both in stills and videos. If you’re a geek who likes to fiddle around with different settings, then you’ll love the camera UI. There’s a lot of menus to customise depending on the scene you’re planning to snap. I’m no expert in the camera segment, but taking great pictures felt simple and good. There’s also a dedicated camera button on the ion. So you can immediately launch the camera using that button and use the same for snapping pictures. When you launch the camera using this button, it immediately snaps a photo automatically to ensure that you don’t miss what you want to shoot. Its a nice addition. Sometimes great moments waits for none. The camera also supports Panorama feature which is nice. It does Panorama in 3D as well. Taking Panorama photos are limited to landscape mode. When selected, turn the phone to landscape mode and start sweeping the phone from left to right by default or change the direction of sweeping to up, down or right.
When you take photos in 12MP clarity, they have a ratio of 4:3 which will look letter boxed on widescreen TVs and displays including your phone. So, you can choose to snap photos in 9MP clarity which takes photos in 16:9. So your photos look great as they fill up the entire screen of the aforementioned devices. Here are a few photos we took with the Xperia ion. The clarity and detail is amazing. I didn’t have to dive in to camera settings much to achieve this quality. Everything was set to default and focus was set to Touch to focus for close-up shots. I’m really impressed with the clarity. They also looked good on the big screen.
The phone also does great full HD videos. The videos recorded are at 30fps and obviously at 1080p. The quality is great. The audio clarity on the videos also require special mention. The audio sounded pretty good when I took a sample outside the house where the surroundings was a little noisy. The video is embedded below for your judgement.
While recording video you get the option to shoot using the front camera or the back camera. You can also choose different scenes, adjust exposure levels and keep flashlight on if situation demands it. These settings have to selected before you begin to capture. The video sample here is the same place where we shot our iPhone 5 camera sample as well. If you would like to see how good that is, click here.
Software:
Xperia Ion runs Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box and is scheduled to get Jellybean in early 2013. Ice Cream Sandwich powered with Sony’s Timescale UI gives you a very good experience with the phone. The Timescape UI is very rich and gives more standard look to the software. It also brings a few customisations and some apps in the package. You’ll find apps like the smart connect, Track ID, Play Now and more. These are extra software additions that are exclusive to Sony devices. Icons and animations in the Timescape UI is also eye candy. Sony has also integrated major social media services in to the Timescape UI to give you a much better experience. If you compare it with Touchwhiz UI on the Samsung Galaxy series, the Timescape looks far more superior in style. However, if you try to compare it side by side with the number of features, then Touchwhiz UI may have some lead. But that may be negligible to many. As for apps, you can enjoy all of the great apps that are available from Android’s Play Store. Apps run quite fast on this Xperia hardware. I didn’t experience any kind of lags or much delays while multitasking either. With Android’s Play Store matching Apple AppStore in the total number of apps, you will hardly find yourself returning from the Play store without finding a new app to try out.
As I mentioned above, the Timescape UI really makes the Android experience stylish. The theme of the UI is elegant and there a couple of themes you can choose as well to match your mood and style. Timescape has given the music player a massive facelift compared to Google’s stock music player. The music player on Xperia Ion lets you switch between songs by swiping the album art left/right. The album arts are beautifully stacked and the music player’s background adjusts its colour to match the most dominating colour on the artwork that’s being played. You can also easily choose Play On feature to wirelessly play the music to your home theatre system. This feature uses DLNA technology to stream music to other devices. Hence, make sure you’re connected to the same WiFi network as the device to which you’re streaming. The Gallery app is also beautiful. It displays all your photos as thumbnails beautifully arranged and some thumbnails really stand out of the collection. The size of thumbnails can be adjusted by pinching in and out from the gallery value which is really cool. As usual, you’ll also find a plethora of options to share your photos or edit them using another app.
There’s also a dedicated app for accessing all your social content like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc. It pulls all the updates from all these networks and shows them in one place in a stacked UI. In landscape orientation, they beautifully re-orients to form a cover flow like UI. Other apps inlcude Back Up and Restore app that creates back up of the phone contents to restore later at any case of data loss and wipe off. Sony also has a software, something I would like to describe as an intelligent software that can act according to certain situations if preset. For example, you can assign it to run the music player when you connect the earphones. Or you can set it to run the Back Up and Restore app when you connect it to a charger etc. The app is called LiveWare manager and works flawlessly. Sony also has included the Track ID app that works pretty similar to Shazam or Soundhound. The app can listen to music and then fetch you the song details in seconds. It also provides link to the purchase the song online which is cool. Talking about music, if you fall in to any supported countries of Sony’s Music and Video unlimited service, then you can enjoy great collection of song and videos right on your phone. It’s really interesting to see what Sony has done to Android using Timescape UI. The phone is expected to get Jelly Bean soon in early 2013 as Sony is now customising the same with Timescape.
Sony also has a PC client and a Mac client to sync your phone with computer. We used it with a Mac and the client Sony Bridge for Mac worked quite perfectly. You can easily sync music from iTunes, sync photos from iPhoto or even import the photos from your phone to computer. You can also explore files on the phone using the app. During our period of review, we also received a firmware update via the client and the phone was updated easily without any failures or other hassles.
To conclude, we loved the Xperia Ion. It’s got a gorgeous design, a big feature set and perfect software that can give you a smooth experience, plus some Sony exclusive services. However, if you’re not a fan of big phones, then this may not be the one for you. Its got a 4.5 inch display which may not suite everyone. Not to mention, the audio output from the speaker was also underwhelming. It wasn’t really clear and there were a lot of noise during playback. That aside, the phone is great considering the Mobile Bravia display, 12MP camera and decent battery life that can easily get you through a day easily. Sony Xperia Ion is priced at Rs 30,000/- approximately.