Returned back Sony Xperia ion due to several issues

I was planning to buy a smartphone for myself from a long time. Now three days back I read an internet article on Sony Xperia ion which mentioned its specifications and other details. I was impressed and thus I decided to purchase it. After purchasing it yesterday, I started using it but the actual piece didn’t impress me even a bit so I returned it to the vendor. The first thing that I was disappointed with was the battery life of this phone. It would consume around 20% battery within half an hour. Has anyone else been disappointed by Sony Xperia ion?

I too am disappointed by the battery life that Sony Xperia ion provides. I thought that the 1900 mAh battery would provide a good amount of time, but I played three songs with the speaker sound on medium and the battery went down to 70%. Then I browsed internet with 3G on and the battery down after surfing for 20 minutes. I know that 3G consumes a large amount of battery but this one is ridiculous. I have tried various options to preserve the battery like turning the brightness of the screen to 30% and turning of 3G and some other options, but everything failed.

With low battery life, it also becomes difficult to upgrade the Sony Xperia ion‘s operating system to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. To upgrade operating system, one needs to have a good amount of battery. Also the phone over works during this whole process leading to requirement of more battery which means that current battery life is insufficient to perform this action.

Another problem of Sony Xperia ion is that the battery is attached to the body and there is no direct way of detaching it from the phone which adds to the difficulty of the user. We can’t even carry a spare battery while travelling so that if the main battery gets exhausted, we can replace it with a charged one.

The auto brightness adjustment feature available in Sony Xperia ion is very annoying and doesn’t work as it works in other phones. I don’t know why it is happening, but either the phone takes the brightness to the highest level or to the lowest level when the auto brightness feature is enabled. The phones that previously which had this feature would recognize between natural light and artificial light. So if I sit under sunlight, the screen goes very bright and same happens when I sit under a tube light. If my finger comes near the sensor, the brightness of Sony Xperia ion goes totally down, maybe around 20% or so. It becomes very disturbing when walking down the street as slight shadow on the sensor and the brightness goes down. It is like flickering on screen.

There is a big issue with connectivity of 3G, 4G, LTE and Wi-Fi on Sony Xperia ion. I was sitting in a cafe which has a Wi-Fi hotspot. It was taking a long time to connect to it. Even after connecting the phone to the Wi0Fi, the performance was very bad. I thought that many people must be using it causing a bottleneck for me, so ignored the problem.

Actually, Sony Xperia ion took more than twice amount of time to connect than my old HTC One X. I have a 3G connection on my phone which I started, it showed me 4 bars of connection, but the performance was so poor that I had to terminate the connection. Then I realized that connectivity of 3G is also poor. It was not the poor quality of reception of Wi-Fi but it was Sony Xperia ion’s fault.

Even if the connectivity for 3G, 4G is good, Sony Xperia ion doesn’t give proper speed. When I am connected to 3G, the download speed is of around 120 to 140 kbps. This is the speed an EDGE connection gives. The 3G network should have given more speed. When I connected to Wi-Fi, the speed was so bad; it was like using a dial-up network. In the same Wi-Fi connection, I tried my brother’s Samsung Galaxy SIII and it was getting proper speed. So I think that Sony Xperia ion really gives problem when it comes to connectivity.

The physical buttons used in Sony Xperia ion are so bad that you have to actually strain your fingers to use them properly. It becomes difficult to be precise while tapping on these buttons. You can get habituated to it after using it for some time but getting used to it is the most difficult part. But when using it quickly, you can expect it to be precise. If you have fat hands, then you will have some difficulty to use this phone.

Except for the few problems that Sony Xperia ion has, I think that this phone is great. The phone is smooth in operation. Usually we see that after opening multiple apps on a phone slows down the performance, but this is not the case here. This phone manages the memory and other resources so well that even after opening multiple apps it doesn’t cluster. Also the touch screen is very smooth. It can be compared with smoothness of Samsung Galaxy SIII which I find the best. The sound quality is impressive and so is the picture quality of the screen good.

I don’t know if the battery life of Sony Xperia ion is low. But I have been using it for speaking and for messaging. I haven’t played Music, videos or games on it. But if this phone issued just for talking and messaging, then the battery can survive for around 8 hours. But one thing I am totally disappointed with Sony Xperia ion is that it takes long time to be fully charged. It took me two hours to get battery to 100% from 15% charge remaining position. I think that this is the worst part of this phone.