Hands on with Sony's first independent smartphone, the Xperia Ion

Sony plans to introduce its first Sony-branded phone on AT&T’s LTE network this year, the company announced at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 9. The Xperia Ion has impressive specs and a beautiful screen, though it wasn’t a perfect experience in our hands.

The Xperia Ion has a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 16GB of internal storage behind a gorgeous 1280x720 display. Only a few companies have managed to eschew the lesser PenTile displays, but with the force of the Bravia brand behind Sony’s phones (the Sony Ericsson brand in the photos is just an anachronism, we’re told) , we expect they’ll lead the charge for high-quality screens. How the battery life will be on those phones is another matter. 

The Xperia Ion felt light and not too big in hand for it’s 4.6-inch screen size—in fact, we barely noticed its large size, despite usually balking at phones of similar girth. The edges weren’t very comfortable to hold, but the rounded back may do better work in that area. 

The sleep and volume buttons on the sides had nice give, but the navigation buttons along the bottom of the screen were very under-responsive. Those soft buttons are stylized with an underscoring light, and we seemed to have better luck tapping at the light than the icon itself—a little misleading given the history of how Android buttons are used, but we would learn. If that was the correct way.

Other than the iffy soft buttons, the screen was very responsive and took swipes and taps beautifully. The phone has 12-megapixel camera that we didn’t get to test out, but Sony boasts that the app can go from launch to the first shot in 1.5 seconds. 

One big issue was left unaddressed by Sony: there was no mention of an upgrade trajectory to Android 4 in its press release. Given that Sony is new to handling its own phone business, we’d tread carefully with that.

The Xperia Ion also allows it to fit in a dock and be used with a large display. This works much like the media side of the webtop experience Motorola launched earlier in the year: we could send text messages, play music, and view photos. The phone was controllable with the TV’s remote, and a Sony representative told Ars that it would work with any TV’s remote—not just Sony’s. However, the phone also displays a browsing app on the TV, which can’t be used without a keyboard worked into the mix.

By Casey Johnston