Sony Xperia Ion - The Big Xperia Brother

Overview & Design

Sony Mobile has sure taken its time to deliver the Sony Xperia Ion. The 4.55-inch device was first unveiled with the Xperia S about seven months ago at CES 2012 but has only recently resurfaced during a huge local Southeast Asia (SEA) event in late-June where five other Xperia devices were unveiled as well. The Sony Xperia Ion was initially unveiled as an LTE-based smartphone that's exclusive to AT&T in the US, but Sony has since added a HSPA variant to the fray - it is the latter that we would be looking at in this review. No doubt, the big 4.55-inch screen - the biggest on a Sony Mobile device - propels the smartphone into the higher-tiered arena of mobile phones despite its dual-core processor. How does the Xperia Ion fit into the grand scheme of things? Let's find out.

The Sony Xperia Ion sports the same angular build that is found on the NXT series and you can barely tell them apart save for the transparent element that's absent on the Ion. While we applaud Sony for taking charge of its phone designs - the Ion is remarkably constructed and sheathed in a mixture of plastic and aluminum -, we were expecting their new phones to look a little less like each other and have a wee bit of distinction form each model. It is, in our opinion, second to HTC in terms of churning out classy-looking phones, but keeping its design too similar to the others in its line-up would probably hurt its chances.



The Xperia Ion is a big phone and despite having a striking angular form, we found it rather impractical due to its wide girth and extended length. We would have preferred slightly rounded edges to complement its large angular design. As mentioned earlier, the phone comes with a plastic/metal body which feels extremely sturdy. Unfortunately due to these design traits, the price it had to pay was a letdown in its portability - the Xperia Ion feels a tad too heavy for our liking. Perhaps the phone was better directly catered for the European and US markets where statistics have long shown favor of larger devices.

As it is with many new phones these days, all physical control buttons are relegated to one side. In the Xperia Ion's case, the power button, volume rocker and shutter button are located on the right, with the HDMI and microUSB ports placed on the left profile. The pair of ports are protected by a rather flimsy plastic cover that came off occasionally while we were testing the device. Like the NXT series, the Xperia Ion comes with a non-removable battery. If you take a quick look at the back of the smartphone, it wouldn't hit you immediately so as to where to fit your MicroSD or MicroSIM cards. Thankfully, it was a simple press and slide affair to get the small top cover removed - that is, after spending a while trying to figure out the location of both of these slots. Usually, either there would be markings to indicate their locations or a more intuitive design aspect would present itself but we didn't notice either on the Ion.

The Xperia Ion was originally mentioned to come with Android 2.3 but it has since been updated to Android 4.0. The also explains why the Ion comes with four touch controls instead (menu, home, black and search) as opposed to the usual three found on Android 4.0 devices. To open the multi-tasking tab, simply long-press the home control. Pressing the menu button while on any of the home screens opens up the options to change wallpaper and theme or add widgets to your home page instead of the usual settings tab - an implementation that doesn't quite make sense to us. Instead, we had to navigate to settings via the app drawer, which takes a couple more clicks and flicks than on other Android devices.

Features

The new Sony Xperia Ion is equipped with its own proprietary Sony UI running on top of Android 4.0. During a short chat with Sony Mobile during MWC, the company revealed its plans to improve its user interface, with the new changes aimed at providing a streamlined and minimalist visual design. These are, of course, reflected on the Xperia Ion but we must say that these additions are pretty incremental in nature. Check out the short clip below for a quick round-up of changes you can expect form the new UI:

Play

The experience is largely positive on the Xperia Ion but isn't that much different from other Android 4.0 phones. There are a couple of fluffy additions on the device but none that drastically change the basic Android experience. We must add that the user interface looks pretty decent and efforts to make it more cosmetically appealing can be clearly seen throughout the UI.

Smartphone Performance

The Sony Xperia Ion comes equipped with a snappy dual-core 1.5GHz processor alongside 1GB of RAM. These specs placed the device as a mid-tier smartphone, alongside this year's and last year's crop of dual-core devices. As usual, we subjected the review unit to the Quadrant benchmark, which can be found on Google Play. To gauge how it performed against the competition, we matched its scores against a mixture of devices using dual-core processors such as the Motorola Razr Maxx, HTC One S and Samsung Galaxy Nexus. For those who are unfamiliar with the Quadrant benchmark used below, it evaluates the CPU, memory, I/O, and 3D graphics of Android devices.

 

The Sony Xperia Ion scored an acceptable 3066, overtaking both Motorola Razr Maxx's TI OMAP 4430 processor and Samsung Galaxy Nexus' TI OMAP 4460 processor. It was second in-line among the compared phones and unsurprisingly lost out to the HTC One S because of its older S3 graphics co-processor and the difference in clock speed of the main processing unit.

Raw benchmarking results aside, the Xperia Ion ran extremely smooth in actual usage and had absolutely no problems rendering pages or running graphic-intensive apps like Temple Run. The phone's lag-free performance, brisk day-to-day user experience and blazing fast web loading definitely contributed to a positive user experience.



 

Imaging Performance

The new Sony Xperia Ion comes with a relatively high 12-megapixel camera with 16x zoom. Typically, a smartphone of its caliber and above comes equipped with an 8-megapixel camera. To say that we didn't have high hopes would have been a lie especially since Xperia phones have traditionally maintained a good track record in the camera imaging quality department.

Images captured by the phone showcased warm, evenly-saturated colors with decent levels of details. The level of noise was a little too high for our liking, so much so that they were pretty visible even when we didn't zoom into the photos. This is to be expected because the sensor is small but comes with such a higher level of pixel count than most other phones. Despite this, we found the camera performance generally positive for a smartphone.

Battery Mileage

Using the same 480 x 800 pixels resolution video that we use across all our mobile device battery tests, we set the same test parameters which includes having the video looped under the following conditions:

• Brightness and volume at 100%
  
   
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
  
   
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter
  
   

The Sony Xperia Ion didn't fare well in the battery department. Despite coming with a relatively high 1900mAh battery capacity, the smartphone ended up at the bottom of the barrel. We attribute this to its huge 4.55-inch TFT LCD screen and the fact that the other phones come with AMOLED screens which are more energy-saving than its standard LCD counterparts. The Motorola Razr Maxx is clearly the winner here clocking in 864 minutes of running time on a very high capacity 3300mAh battery.



These results are similarly reflected in the phones' power consumption results with the Xperia Ion emerging as the phone with the highest level of consumption for the reasons mentioned above. Likewise in the portability chart, the smartphone's relatively dismal battery life, alongside Xperia Ion's bigger build and relatively heavy frame, contributed to an overall low portability score.



Other than the above formal usage based tests, we observed that the phone could last almost a whole working day on a single charge, with emails and Twitter feeds pushed constantly to it when using the phone in a casual manner for day-to-day needs. Other activities included occasional web surfing and phone calls. So from a casual usage standpoint, the phone is able to last as long as most other devices.



 

Conclusion

Sony has mostly been a small step behind its smartphone competitors - it was one of the last manufacturers to jump on the dual-core wagon, at a time where others were clamoring to outfit their devices with quad-cores, and now, a good few months after its competitors introduced phones with big screens (4.6- to 4.8-inches), comes their very own 4.55-inch Sony Xperia Ion. These external factors most likely have eaten at a share of potential customers who are constantly looking at chasing the latest tech trends. It's a pity of course, given that Sony Mobile smartphones' performance standings are mostly above average, albeit slightly dated in hardware.



In terms of design, Sony has always made classy-looking phones. However, the Xperia Ion looks too much like the other phones under the new Sony Mobile belt. Nonetheless, the mobile device boasts good build quality, feels sturdy and well-protected. Handling-wise, we found a few quirks in its performance, but nothing that will make or break the overall experience. The Xperia Ion did relatively well in the Quadrant test, with no lags and buttery-smooth performance. The same can be said for its camera performance as it did sufficiently well in our opinion despite higher levels of noise. Its 4.55-inch Bravia-supported screen showcased crisp details, good viewing angles with adequate brightness even under sunlight.

The only dent in its overall performance is in its lackluster battery test results, in which it lasted only 240 minutes in our formal video-looping battery test. The rest of its close competitors did significantly better, with the second lowest coming in at 329 minutes. We pinpointed the battery performance discrepancy to the non-usage of an AMOLED screen, which resulted in higher battery consumption. Fortunately, its day-to-day battery performance expectations are pretty much in-line with most other comparable devices and is able to last a full day.

The Xperia Ion comes with a rather hefty price tag of S$798 - for just a tad less, you can also opt for the much longer lasting Motorola Razr Maxx ($749). Other options also include the HTC One S ($748) or the older Samsung Galaxy Nexus (from $630) or Galaxy S II (from $607).

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