The Sony-made AT&T Xperia ion will be made available by the U.S. mobile carrier on June 24 for $99.99 with a new contract.

The announcement about the availability of the AT&T Xperia ion was made five months after the Sony Xperia smartphone debuted at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Back during the unveiling of the Sony Xperia ion, it was revealed that it is an exclusive AT&T smartphone.

The AT&T Xperia ion is an LTE smartphone and will be equipped with a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon central processing unit on a Qualcomm MSM8260 chipset.

The AT&T Xperia ion will also be equipped with an Adreno 220 graphics processing unit and 1GB of Random Access Memory.

Serving as the screen of the smartphone will be a LED-backlit LCD capacitive touch screen measuring 4.55 inches diagonally.

This screen will be featuring a resolution of 720p (1,280 x 720 pixels) for a pixel density of 323 pixels per inch which is very near the Retina Display resolution of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S at 330 pixels per inch. Another significant feature of this screen is that it’s protected with scratch-resistant glass and features the Sony Mobile Bravia Engine and the Timescape user interface.

All of this hardware is enclosed in a 133 x 68 x 10.8 millimeters chassis which weighs 144 grams. That body also holds a 1,900 mAh battery rated for up to 400 hours standby on 2G and up to 350 hours standby on 3G. Talk time is estimated at up to 10 hours on 2G and up to 4 hours on 3G. the AT&T Xperia ion is estimated to last up to 12 hours playing music.

The AT&T Xperia ion works in 2G (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900), 3G (HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100) and 4G (LTE 700 MHz Class 17 / 1700 / 2100). It’s estimated to have a GPRS speed of up to 86 kbps, an EDGE speed of up to 237 kbps, an HSDPA downlink speed of up to 21.1 Mbps, an HSUPA uplink speed of up to 5.8 Mbps, an LTE uplink speed of up to 50 mbps and downlink speed of up to 100 mbps.

As for other wireless connections, the high-end smartphone features Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and the ability to serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot. Bluetooth 2.1 is also present with Advanced Audio Distribution Profile and Enhanced Data Rate enabled.

All that data which can be downloaded by the AT&T Xperia ion can be stored using the 16GB built in storage memory which can be supplemented via a microSD card. The smartphone can accommodate up to 32GB microSD cards.

The phone may need that big a microSD card especially if users will be taking a lot of photos using the phone’s 12-megapixel rear camera. This camera is equipped with autofocus and LED Flash which can be continuously operated while the phone is recording Full HD 1080p videos at 30 frames per second. Recording video is also aided by video stabilization.

Other features of this camera are geo-tagging, touch focus, 3D sweep panorama, image stabilization at face and smile detection.

The front snapper of the AT&T Xperia ion is also no sissy at 1.3 megapixel capable of capturing 720p HD video at 30 frames per second.

Other features of the new smartphone include Stereo FM , GPS (with A-GPS), GLONASS, and social media integration.

The AT&T Xperia ion is still running on Android 2+ Gingerbread buy Sony has said that it will be updated to the latest Android OS, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Image 2 from 水哥 on Flickr (CC)

About Solon Harmony Dolor

A passion for technology and journalism makes this upcoming writer very interested in social media and technology news. Fresh from finishing an English and Journalism degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman, he aims to bring interesting news to our readers .