Sony Xperia ion for AT&T review: US Xperiance

Introduction 

Sony was the talk of town during CES 2012 back in January and the Xperia ion for AT&T was among the main reasons why. Launched alongside the Xperia S, the Sony Xperia ion took the great honor of being the company's first LTE smartphone. To make the matters even more epic, the smartphone marked Sony Mobile's grand return to the most lucrative segment of the US smartphone market - that of the high-end, tricked out handsets with spec sheets as long as a daily newspaper. In a nutshell, the Sony Xperia ion was a big deal anyway you looked at it.

Sony Xperia ion official photo

Arriving to the market six months after its announcement, the Sony Xperia ion has a different smartphone landscape to face. Samsung and HTC have already released their heavy hitters in the United States, packing better internals, and offering more up-to-date software experience. To put it mildly - arriving late to the party, the Sony Xperia ion now finds itself outgunned by the competition.

What makes this occurrence particularly frustrating is the fact that this wasn't the case at the smartphone's announcement six months ago. Back in January, the Xperia ion for AT&T could go have a go at any top-of-the-line Android smartphone on the market and emerge victorious.

To offset the massive delay, the Sony Xperia ion is priced quite aggressively. AT&T asks only $99.99 for the smartphone. Should you choose to pick one up directly from Sony though, you will only have to shell out $49.99 with a two-year contract. Cutting edge it might be not, but the Sony Xperia ion still offers you a lot of smartphone for the money. Here goes the list of its full talents.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
• Tri-band 3G with 21Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• Category 3 LTE network connectivity
• 4.6" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit LCD touchscreen of 720p resolution (720 x 1280 pixels) with Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine; Scratch-resistant glass
• Dual-core 1.5 GHz Scorpion CPU, 1 GB RAM, Adreno 220 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 chipset
• 12 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geo-tagging, Multi Angle shot
• 1080p video recording @ 30fps with continuous autofocus and stereo sound
• 1.3 MP front-facing camera, 720p video recording
• Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
• GPS with A-GPS
• 16GB built-in storage; microSD card slot
• microHDMI port, dedicated TV launcher
• microUSB port (charging); stereo Bluetooth v2.1
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• Voice dialing
• Adobe Flash 11 support
• Deep Facebook integration
• PlayStation Certified
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor

Main disadvantages

• Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread out of the box doesn't cut it for a high-end device this far into 2012
• Display has sub-par side viewing angles
• Underwhelming front touch buttons and side camera key
• Non-user replaceable battery

As you have probably noticed above, the Sony Xperia ion for AT&T is rather closely related to the Xperia S, which came to be quite popular. In order to be more appealing to the US users however, the handset has seen its screen stretch up a bit. The microSD card slot is also a nice addition to the spec sheet - after all, the handset is made for consuming multimedia and playing videogames.

The biggest letdown about the Sony Xperia ion for AT&T is undoubtedly the lack of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box. Sony's customization of Android 2.3 Gingerbread is quite polished but still - it simply does not befit a mid-2012 high-end device. The battery life could have also been much better, given the handset's knack for multimedia.

  
Sony Xperia ion live photos

As always, we are going to kick things off with an unboxing of the Sony Xperia ion for AT&T, followed by a design and build quality inspection.

A retail box to match the price tag

Much like with the case of other $99 smartphones, the Sony Xperia ion for AT&T won't blow you away with its retail package. Inside the orange/white colored box, you will find a charger and a microUSB cable, along with the usual set of booklets.

Quite frankly, a set of headphones would have been much appreciated here, especially given Sony's own lineup of accessories. In the case of the AT&T flavored Xperia ion however, you will have to get one on your own dime.

The 12MP camera could have done much better

The Xperia ion has a 12 megapixel camera, complete with a single LED light. It's capable of producing images with resolution of 4000 x 3000 pixels, and packs Sony's usual panorama and 3D photo mode.

The camera controls on the Xperia ion are available on two taskbars on either side of the viewfinder. On the left you get four shortcuts to various settings, while the still camera/camcorder toggle, the virtual shutter key and a thumbnail of the last photo taken are on the right.

The menu key brings up two pages of extra settings: scenes, resolution, smile detection, geotagging, image stabilization and focus mode, among others. You can customize three of the shortcuts on the left (the shooting mode shortcut is fixed).

 
 
The Xperia ion camera interface

There're five capture modes to choose from: Normal, Scene recognition, Sweep Panorama, Sweep Multi Angle and 3D Sweep Panorama. In Normal, you pick the Scene settings manually or you can enable Scene recognition and let the Xperia S take a guess (it's fairly good at it).

The 3D Sweep Panorama is business as usual - you press the shutter key and pan the phone across the scene. The resulting panoramic photo can be viewed in both 2D and 3D (on a compatible TV).

The Sweep Multi Angle is much more impressive - you take a photo in the exact same way, but the result is very different. It produces something like a lenticular card.

Tilting the phone lets you look at the object from different sides. A shot of a moving object looks like an animated GIF or creates interesting distortions, which can be pretty funny too.

The Xperia ion features a Quick launch option, which lets you customize the phone's behavior upon a press of the camera key when the phone is locked. The default option is Launch and capture - it unlocks the phone, starts the camera and instantly snaps a photo - a rather uncomfortable choice because it's nearly impossible to correctly frame a picture before the screen is on. This usually produces images with motion blur. The other option is to just unlock the phone and start the camera, or you can disable the feature completely.

The hardware shutter key on the Xperia ion does a good job. The phone itself is comfortable to hold. Still, pressing the shutter key all the way down requires too much effort for shake-free shooting.

The Sony Xperia ion may have a 12MP sensor, but from where we see it, it's more of a marketing gimmick than a real-world advantage. The image quality is actually nice, but only when you view the photos without any zooming. In fit-to-screen mode on our 1080p monitor, the photos looked nice and lively, perhaps just a bit oversaturated, but generally pleasing.

Zooming in to 100%, at pixel-per-pixel level, we see a different story. The photos produced by the Xperia ion have above the average noise levels even in broad daylight. The resolved detail is not more than the one offered by the better 8MP cameraphones (well, perhaps the macro shot of the wrist watch being the only exception).

And finally, on all photos the foliage in the trees have an unnatural watercolor look, which most of the 8MP competitors get right even at 100% magnification. It's the result of the Xperia ion's uneven struggle with the noise. Noise reduction algorithms take their toll on the fine detail and grass and foliage is usually where it gets hit first.

Unfortunately, though it may seem that the Xperia ion is an imaging-centric device, the reality is it only has an average camera and it looks Sony engineers have not put much effort into it either.

   
   
Sony Xperia ion samples

FullHD video recording is not much better

The Sony Xperia ion camera offers 1080p video capture @ 30fps, matching what we saw in the Xperia S. The camcorder has similar settings to the still camera, including focus mode, metering, exposure value, image stabilization and so on. The layout of the shortcuts can be customized here too.

 
 
Camcorder mode

Video is probably a department where the Xperia ion can redeem itself of the average still performance. Unfortunately, most of the video we shot with it came out focused at a closer distance than we would have liked, eventually rendering slightly out of focus everything further than 5-10m. As a result videos from the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S III have stunningly more detail than those of the ion. The good thing is you can only tell the difference when you compare those head to head. On their own, the Xperia ion videos look as good as any other recent cameraphone.

So the videos by the Xperia ion turn out slightly better than average but nothing to write home about.

Check out the video samples we captured with the Xperia ion below.

If you want to look closer at the video quality, you can download this untouched 1080p@30fps sample, taken straight off the device.

Final words

Let's be honest here - Sony missed a great opportunity with the Xperia ion for AT&T. Had the device hit the shelves shortly after its announcement, it would have enjoyed a flagship status and a higher price tag, along with the potential for selling in significant numbers.

The Sony Xperia ion for AT&T still offers great value for its price tag, despite not being a top dog anymore. Solid build, gorgeous screen, and award winning looks are likely to attract buyers. Having AT&T's blazing LTE network speeds on board doesn't hurt either. The power for Sony as a premium brand would help the Xperia ion's cause as well.

Unfortunately, if you really want to grab a Sony Xperia ion for AT&T, you will have to make do with Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread. This is absolutely inexcusable for a smartphone with a spec sheet as the Xperia ion's, coming to the market this far into 2012. We are not sure who's to blame for this - we know that the HSPA version of the device ships with Ice Cream Sandwich, so AT&T's approval process might have something to do with the presence of the ageing Google OS.

The sensitivity of the capacitive buttons below the phone's display could have also been better. Not to mention the performance of the 12MP snapper - we really had high hopes for it, but it simply didn't deliver.

We already mentioned to you that AT&T is asking $99.99 for the Sony Xperia ion. On this instance, we would highly recommend that you go ahead and grab one directly from Sony, as it will cost you half as much with a two-year commitment.

For $49.99, the Sony Xperia ion for AT&T is really a smartphone deal to consider. Here are some other options too.

We will begin with two Samsung Galaxy S II versions, which are part of AT&T's smartphone lineup. The I777 is the closest relative to the already legendary I9100. It will entice you with a polished ICS experience and better performance for $99.99. For the same price, the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket is also a great option. It shares most internals as the Xperia ion, LTE included, but comes with a more energy-efficient Super AMOLED Plus screen source

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