Sony Xperia Ion (AT&T)

With terrific TV connectivity and a 12-megapixel camera, Sony's Xperia Ion ($99.99 with contract) is the ideal Android phone?for folks who want to take their movies everywhere, showing them on any screen available. It's quirky and not an industry leader in other ways, though, with weak phone calling performance and some other bugs.

Physical Design
The Xperia Ion is a large phone, the way phones seem to be nowadays. It's 5.2 by 2.7 by .4 inches (HWD) and a solid 5.1 ounces, all in black with a curved metal back that makes it wobble a little bit when placed down on a table. It feels like it's made of premium materials: The screen is cold glass, and the top and bottom of the back are soft-touch plastic. You're getting your money's worth here.

The front is mostly a 4.55-inch, 1280-by-720-pixel TFT LCD screen. The screen has unusually deep blacks, thanks to a technology Sony calls "mobile Bravia." Below the screen there are the usual four silkscreened soft buttons for Android actions. The headphone jack is on top, and there's a dedicated camera key on the side.

The Xperia Ion's battery isn't removable, but a sliver of the top of the back cover is, letting you pop in a microSIM card and MicroSD memory card.

Call Quality, Wireless and Battery
I didn't find the Ion to be a very good phone. Reception isn't the problem?volume is. The Ion's speaker is quiet, and its speakerphone is so quiet as to be barely usable. Making a call in a noisy outdoor area I could hardly hear my wife on the other end of the line, in either mode.

There's little noise cancellation in the microphone, too, so background noise comes through very clearly on the other side of calls. A call made from the Ion sounded a bit scratchy on the other end, and a call made from the Ion's speakerphone sounded muddy. In this case, a Bluetooth headset actually improved things.

The Ion is an AT&T-compatible LTE phone with national and global HSPA+ roaming, although it doesn't support T-Mobile's 3G band. AT&T only has LTE in 39 cities right now, but where it does, speed is scorching, usually exceeding 10Mbps down. The phone works as a Wi-Fi hotspot with the appropriate service plan.

Bluetooth and GPS make their usual appearance, and the GPS locked into our location without a problem. The Ion also supports two lesser-used wireless technologies: ANT and NFC. ANT+ is mostly used for health-and-fitness devices. NFC's most prominent app right now is Google Wallet, but Google Wallet isn't available in the Ion's Google Play market.

Battery life was mediocre, but not awful, with 5 hours and 20 minutes of talk time.?

Performance
The Ion runs Android 2.3.7 (Gingerbread) on a Qualcomm S3, 1.5GHz dual-core processor. This doesn't offer quite the speed we've seen from the S4 processor in the likes of the HTC One X ($199, 4.5 stars) and?Samsung Galaxy S III ($199, 4.5 stars), especially when it comes to gaming frame rates, but it does fine on benchmarks.?The interface was generally responsive, but the soft buttons at the bottom of the screen sometimes didn't respond to touches.

Sony's approach to Android adds a relatively light skin and some bloatware. You have various options to sort apps in the App Tray, for instance, and a very useful new Power Manager app which can turn off power-hungry radios when your battery is low.

Optional Facebook integration lets you add Facebook contacts and calendars to the phone's contact and calendar apps. If you're a fan of Sony's old Timescape, Rolodex-like display of social networking updates, you can install it as an app.

Sony's LiveWare Manager is another interesting utility: It lets you automatically launch an app when you connect an accessory, for instance launching the music player as soon as you plug in your headphones. This approach also comes into play with a new accessory called Xperia Smart Tags, little NFC-enabled stickers that can be configured to change your phone's settings or launch apps when you tap the phone to them. LiveWare Manager also provides a central place to manage the extensions for your Sony SmartWatch ($149, 3.5 stars), which puts email and social networking alerts on your wrist.

Of course, this being Android, it's compatible with all the 400,000-plus Android apps. Sony has made an unusually strong commitment to updating its phones, which makes us hope for an Android 4.0 update soon. But it's still disappointing that the phone comes with an older OS, especially now that the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC One X are both shipping with Ice Cream Sandwich.

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