14 DAY TRIAL // The Japanese company that bought Sony's VAIO brand has recently launched the first ever smartphone wearing this brand. The VAIO smartphone is going to sell in Japan for no less than $420 (€390) outright, which seriously overpriced considering what it has to offer.
The VAIO smartphone will eventually be released in Europe as well, probably with the same outrageous price tag attached to it, but we're not sure how well it will fare against so many other Android handsets in the mid-range specs.
One reason that the VAIO smartphone might not be so popular among Android users, apart from the price, should be the fact that it's just another rebranded mid-range handset.
Blog of Mobile has just found out that the VAIO smartphone is in fact a rebranded Panasonic Eluga U2, as phone that's been released on the market last month.
This is probably one of the reasons that VAIO did not want to show what their phone looks like before the smartphone was made official.
As it turns out, VAIO and Panasonic Eluga U2 look exactly the same and offer the same specifications. That being said, here is what you'll get for this overpriced mid-ranger.
Customers are asked to pay more just for the brand
First of all, VAIO's smartphone will ship with Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system out of the box. It also comes equipped with a 64-bit quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor clocked at 1.2GHz.
Qualcomm's CPU is complemented by an Adreno 306 graphics processing unit, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory, which can be further expanded up to 32GB via microSD card slot.
On the back, the smartphone packs a 13-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash and full HD (1080p) video recording, while in the front there's a 5-megapixel camera for video calls and selfies.
Last but not least, VAIO smartphone sports a 5-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that supports HD (720p) resolution and features Corning Gorilla Glass 3 coating.
