It’s not a line of products you normally associate with Sony. PlayStations? Sure. TVs, clock radios, yeah, why not. But smartphones? Apparently so, and the new Ion is now on the market in the United States for the low low LOW price of $99. It works on LTE networks and has a 12 megapixel camera but it also doesn’t even run on the latest version of the Android operating system. It has a big screen and also apparently weighs a lot more than the average smartphone, so you feel like you’re carrying something large and industrial. It’s the Danzig of smartphones!
It’s hard to escape the thought that the compromise Sony made here was cutting the price because it couldn’t release what might have been a flagship phone in its original “Spring” timeline. Even if that’s not the case, it’s simply not a good bet to buy a brand-new Android phone with Gingerbread as the base OS. There are enough good parts to the Xperia ion to make me believe that Sony has the ability to seriously compete in the high-end smartphone market — but it certainly hasn’t done so here.