Gadgetory

what's going on Android lovers this is clayton young we're coming at you from your one and only source for all things android android authority calm today we've got an in-depth review of the sony xperia ion this is a fairly new device and it's rocking some nice hardware it's got the acceptable android software its rocking 2.3 so it's a little bit behind the times in that area it's a great phone on this phone we're rocking a dual-core 1.5 gigahertz Snapdragon s3 processor we've got a 12 megapixel camera in the rear with an LED flash on the front we've got ourselves a 1.3 megapixel camera capable of 720p video capture now the display is also a beautiful 4.6 inch 720p HD Reality Display and we also have these software layer the sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine that's going to help us watch videos play games and view pictures with great clarity and quality so anyways as you can see we have our nice lock screen this is running the timescape UI which is manufactured well by Sony and it's it's a nice overlay over the android gingerbread operating system it's not too obtrusive as i always like to judge the overlays by i don't like them too gaudy and I like the usability of Android anyways this is our nice lockscreen we can slide right to unlock or we can choose our sound profiles by sliding left go ahead and slide right you see this is our nice home screen the timescape UI is a little breath of fresh air from the usual like TouchWiz or sense you eyes and stuff like that and I actually like it a lot so anyways we do have our usual Android apps here in the app tray this does come with some nice AT&T apps because this is the AT&T phone it is available from ninety dollars of their network so we do have our AT&T bloatware as I'd call it but we also have some nice Sony apps some native apps to Sony such as the livewire manager we also have the office suite coming in on this device we have the sony music unlimited service which is actually going to battle the Samsung Music Hub service which we will have a video for when the tentative release date is upcoming we have our power saver features um this game is great with the spiderman game with a lot of like graphic intensive games the Snapdragon s3 processor just blaze's through a lot of stuff it's very fast this is our timescape now the timescape is a social integration client so all your social networks are just integrated right into your phone we'll go ahead and go into our settings to show you the menus on the xperia ion now all of the themes are changeable we can change whether or not we want them green or turquoise or whatnot in the background so we'll start with our Xperia settings here under the experience settings we have our connectivity options on the Facebook inside Xperia is part of the timescape feature then we have our livewire manager so I did integrate my Facebook and my Twitter so we'll check that out here in a minute we do under our wireless network settings have NFC options despite die Android Gingerbread running on this we also have the Wi-Fi all the usual connectivity options such as a you know Bluetooth VPN settings tethering mark all settings sound and display under the display is where we choose our brightness now the brightness has no auto brightness feature as of now we kind of just have to use our own judgement as far as what brightness we want we can turn on our mobile bravia engine from here which enhances games videos and photos but they actually look great we'll go ahead and do some demos here in a minute as well we have our accounts and sync the privacy the usual Android Gingerbread menu options we can go into about phone super rockin two point three point seven we just have our software updates from here this did receive a software update while I had it but it's not going to update to ICS extremely soon it is slated and I hope jellybean is slated as well now on that topic there's not strong developer support for xperia phones and Sony phones in general they're pretty lot they're locked down pretty tight so we don't have a lot of rums and stuff coming out for this phone yet or even a root method but anyways this is one of our nice Timescape widgets you see that we have all of our nice twitter feed and our Facebook just aggregated into one source right here we can scroll up and down nice user interface runs really fast and smooth and it's great we will go ahead and you can change the wallpaper add widgets create folders shortcuts and themes just with a long press on the home screen we'll go ahead and go into the theme settings here which is really nice we have our turquoise theme emerald ATT gold ruby just a bunch of cool themes I'll leave it here on the emerald so click that now you can also create folders on the gingerbread add widgets the widgets are there's a lot of cool ones included those clocks AT&T widgets and then the Native timescape widgets with nice skins on them as you can see our power manager up here has some nice looks to it anyways pulling down the notification bar of course being Android Gingerbread we don't have the functionality of being able to grab and swipe away to kill apps but we can clear simply by pressing be clear now under the messaging we'll go ahead and check out our keyboard some random crap there but our keyboards very nice actually liked it a lot it's great for a stock keyboard we do have predictions and suggestions up here and then it works smoothly then we have our settings android keyboard settings and stuff like that so the keyboard works great we'll go ahead and test out some HD video right now I'm not logged into anything but we will type in HD video 1080p just go ahead and click this I'll show you the nice bravia engine on the Sony Xperia ion whenever we're watching a movie and this has some nice audio on it as well so let's go ahead and watch that this is an animated video but as you can see the colors are really great the vivid bravia engine is just incredible so it looks great we'll go ahead and go back and aside from playing videos excellently we can take videos just wonderfully with the touch of a button we have our 12 megapixel autofocus camera on here it does have the LED flash let's go ahead and bring a pencil over you can see one little problem I've ran into is the autofocus or the focus in general you kind of have to let it sit for just a second but once you take a picture it's easy we have basically zero shutter lag we can just go as fast as we want and we also have our options here we have our different scenes we can have Auto Scene Recognition normal us choose to our front camera three sweet panorama three sweet multi-angle sweep panorama we have our scenes landscape night sports all that great stuff and then we have a document we have our white balance right there we have our flash options and then we can hit the menu the android menu to bring up more options such as the resolution smile detection focus mode we have face detection multi autofocus touch focus i'll go ahead and choose touch focus and then we have our ISO and metering image stabilizer geo-tagging capturing methods shutter sound quick launch and data storage under the capturing method we have the on-screen button touch capture or we have the dedicated hardware camera key up here right next to the volume and the power rocker this takes great videos as well being that it is 12 megapixel so we'll go ahead and just brush past this pencil take a nice video it didn't focus in on it as much as I'd like it to but it did do well we'll go ahead and view that video right from the gallery the gallery is set up in a nice intuitive manner we can scroll through and see all of our images so we'll go ahead and just play this very quickly so you can see it didn't focus kind of a strange coincidence it did not focus as well as I wanted it to though sinners will go back I'm another great feature of the xperia ion is the fact that sony has included NF see and we've got our experience smart tags on deck now these are great they're actually um pretty um built well compared to other smart tags or other NFC tags they're hard plastic and they can hang on things and just work really nice so this phone comes with the smart tag application and with nfc-enabled from the settings menu in the wireless settings we can go ahead and just tap sometimes I have to move it around to get the sweet spot on the phone you know that's this is a problem I've ran into I have NFC enabled but the tag does not register sometimes that's a complaint with the NFC client on the phone that i have not registering there we'll go ahead and go there you go it registered there so there you go there's a good idea of how long it takes to actually get the smart tag going that's a one of my number one complaints for this smoke of this phone the NFC just does not work some of the time so anyways our smart tag is detected once we do that we can choose our different profiles for the smart tag and we can choose different actions to assign the smart tags we can control our wireless settings such as a Wi-Fi Bluetooth all that good stuff and then we can choose our car modes bedroom modes are sound profiles and stuff like that our brightness at the tap of the NFC tags launch different applications all the great stuff that NFC tags have to offer are available with the sony xperia smart tags so we'll go back a quick look at the body it has a really nice form factor we have our nice xperia logo down here it's a nice curved edge around the phone here it feels great in the hand then it has a nice slate screen that's just awesome it's rocking we have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on top we also have right here in h mini HDMI out and then we have the mini USB as usual then I also found that you can pop this bottom off but it does not reveal anything down there of use so i'll go ahead and as you can see there's nothing down here you can access besides some body screws it's an awesome phone it has the Bravia Engine it does a great mobile gaming the Tegra 3 no no no excuse me the Snapdragon s3 works wonderfully so we'll go ahead and do quadrant test very quickly just to show you the speed of this phone okay so for our benchmark looks like we scored 2938 which is actually pretty good that's higher than the Galaxy Nexus or the samsung galaxy tab and giving that this is only a dual-core and it is the Snapdragon s3 rather than the snapdragon s4 which is being implemented I'd say that's a fairly good score it's just blazing fast it'll power through your games your HD video is um it won't lag really I haven't run into any lag on the UM experienced user interface or anything especially when you grab a widget like this you kind of have that wave that you can pull along it gets dragged then nothing ever lags there's no lapses in performance in the app tray it's all great everything is awesome the Snapdragon s3 just powers through it so anyways guys that was the sony xperia ion closer look one more time at the bottom keys down here we do have our for capacitive keys now they don't light up at night which is kind of a pain in the ass but we do have the nice little lights that come on under them so anyways guys that was the sony xperia ion go ahead and check one out if you're looking for a budget price phone with great performance and you're on the AT&T network coming in around ninety nine dollars so pick one of these up they've got NFC a great blazing fast dual-core processor the reality screen four point six inches of great HD quality the nice form factor too it's it's not one to get scuffed up or scratched or anything anyways thanks for watching guys we always appreciate your support