If you like your screen size large and your resolution low, look no further than a 6.1″ display Xperia model with the number D2203. You most likely won’t be carrying this one around in your pockets unless you still own a pair of Jncos jeans from the 1990s, but its sure to be a hit with those who already carry around a purse or laptop bag and want to get into the phablet scene at a low cost of entry. While it used to cost an arm and a leg to own something with a screen this size and specs like it, they seem to be coming down in price and have placed themselves within the reach of just about anyone.
Its expected that this model will ring in somewhere between $200 and $300 dollars based on the upper and lower bounds of the models that surround it, the E1 and the M2, two venerable models that are themselves at a low cost of ownership. For that price, you can’t fault the lower resolution of the display, which according to one benchmark, is 854 x 480, and, as a bonus, supports five-finger multi-touch. The will allow running some of the more fun or useful gesture-driven apps in the Play Store, a boon when your kids get bored and you don’t mind handing them this low-priced phablet to play with.
Along with the big screen is a quad-core Snapdragon 400 CPU that is clocked at 1.2 Ghz so should be able to handle most apps or games you could throw at it and with nearly 1GB of memory, you shouldn’t have any issues running more apps at once either. Onboard storage is limited to 1.7 GB, according to the benchmark, but a microSD card is pretty standard with other Xperia models so there’s no reason to think this would be an exception. Since Android 4.4.2 Sony has given app-to-SD card support to some other Xperia models, so its possible the D2203 could benefit as well. More apps means more usefulness, right? With all this performance-related hardware, you also get the standard suite of sensors and radios: accelerometer, compass, GPS, NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.
There isn’t a lot of information regarding a release date for this hardware, or if it will even appear outside the Asian market, but it does show Sony’s willingness to enter the low cost, larger-format handset arena, which is good news for the industry in general.
