VAIO Surprisingly Entering The Smartphone Market

It has been little over a year since Sony sold off its VAIO PC business to Japan Industrial Partners in an attempt to gird up its loins and focus on its core products (though it may repeat that process again soon). VAIO has recently been doing what we expect it to do: put out and sell laptops and tablets. So imagine the tech world's surprise when word got out that VAIO will actually be announcing a smartphone next month, either in competition or in cooperation with Sony.

The "announcement" doesn't come from VAIO itself but from Japan Communications a mobile company that claims to have been chosen by VAIO to be its partner in this unexpected move. According to the announcement, VAIO will reveal details of the smartphone on March 12, way after MWC 2015 is over.

This smartphone has supposedly been spotted in some benchmarks, and the specs are honestly not that too impressive but are rather on the decent side of things. This smartphone, model JCI VA-10J, will be powered by a 1.2 GHz 64-bit quad-core Snapdragon 410, have 2 GB of RAM, tout a 5-inch 720p HD display, and come with a 13 megapixel rear camera and a 5 megapixel front shooter. It will run Android 5.0 out of the box. Just about right for a mid-range smartphone.

While it is quite surprising that VAIO would venture into this market, there is perhaps nothing in its agreement with Sony that prevents it from putting out its own smartphone. In fact, there might even be the possibility that Sony is partly behind this, if it still has some shares left in the VAIO brand. If so, considering how the first generation of non-Sony VAIO laptops looked like, this VAIO smartphone might very well resemble a mid-range Sony Xperia too.

SOURCE: Japan Communications Inc.

VIA: Blog of Mobile