Sony Xperia Ion Preview

The first day of world's largest international consumer technology tradeshow appeared to be quite fertile for Sony Electronics (yes, SE is rebranded as Sony), with its President and COO, Phil Molyneux unveiling their most recent Android smartphone, the Sony Xperia Ion.

Promising to experience pure entertainment in brilliant HD, Sony Xperia Ion is quite easy to fall in love with! The phone hooks up into the 4G LTE network of AT&T, being available this spring. The 12MP camera to capture your memories in less than a second and an extremely thin design grabbed the attention of many, without a hands-on look at the device.

Other noteworthy specs include a 4.6-inch HD touchscreen, HDMI-out, plus an interface for a TV launcher and a 1280×720 display that makes use of Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine – suspected to be the same technology as to Sony’s line of Bravia TVs.

A compatible dock, the Xperia Ion comes with, enables larger display viewing, and when attached to a TV, users have the ability to play music, view photos and even send out SMS messages from the Xperia Ion to the TV- controlled using any TV remote!

As for the external appearance - Xperia Ion comes housed in an aluminum shell that's promoted as "thin, lightweight, and durable" and the screen is one of Sony's so-called Mobile Bravia Reality Display modules — a technology offering a laminated, gapless appearance.

A release date and price on the Xperia Ion is yet to be announced by Sony, but look for it to launch on AT&T this spring, and don't worry — an Android Ice Cream Sandwich is already in the works!

The Sony Xperia Ion will be the first Sony-branded phone to grace the U.S. market. Coming to AT&T, it packs in 4G LTE speed and a 12-megapixel camera, along with a guaranteed upgrade from Android 2.3.7 to version 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich."

Sony Ericsson is in the middle of becoming Sony; while Sony bought out the Ericsson part of the partnership, the transaction still hasn't legally closed. That means a firm still technically called Sony Ericsson is introducing smartphones with the Sony name on them.

We played with it a bit at the CES trade show. Slim, sleek, and ultra-sharp, the Ion was among the nicest devices we handled at CES.

The Ion has a 4.6-inch, 1280-by-720 pixel HD that looked absolutely gorgeous in person. And because the design of the phone itself is so pared down and trim, it didn't feel unwieldy like some other phones with 4.5-inch+ displays can. There's a built-in HDMI-out port, which means you easily view the content of your phone over an HDTV. The phone is also capable of sharing content via DLNA and Bravia Sync.

The Ion is sporting some impressive specs under the hood, as well. It's powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor, and comes with 16GB of built-in memory. There's also an empty microSD card slot, which allows you to add up to 32GB of additional memory. The phone is running Android 2.3.7 (Gingerbread), and Sony has pledged to upgrade its devices to Ice Cream Sandwich. It felt super swift and responsive as we swiped between home screens and loaded apps.

Xperia Ion Picture

The Xperia Ion also features an impressive 12-megapixel rear-facing camera that captures 1080p video at 30 frames per second. The camera uses Sony's Exmor R sensor, which Sony said greatly improves low-light performance. The camera was especially fast when we tried it out, snapping clear photos almost instantaneously. There's also a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat that is capable of recording 720p video at 30 frames per second.

The Ion will be PlayStation certified, running at least some PlayStation games. Sony's Playstation-everywhere strategy has been a little muddled. The Xperia Play phones have about 200 optimized games, but the Sony Tablet S only had a few dozen when I looked at it, and many well-known PS2 (not to mention PS3) names are missing. Sony execs said that over time, the Ion will gain more PS1 and PS2 games.

It's also unclear whether the Ion will better integrate Sony's media services than the Sony Tablet S ($399, 3 stars) does. Sony owns a lot of great content, but its Crackle, Ustream, Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited services didn't connect with each other at all, requiring multiple sign-ins.

The Ion doesn't have a release date or pricing info yet, other than that it will be available in the "second quarter" of the year. By then it will go up against the HTC Titan II, which sports a 16-megapixel camera (albeit one which might not be as high quality as the Ion's) and the Nokia Lumia 900, with a high-quality 8-megapixel shooter sporting a Carl Zeiss lens.