During May of this year Sony Ericsson really surprised people with the introduction of the Aino. To refresh your memory, the Aino is a slider phone with a 3 inch (16 million color) touchscreen that has GPS, PS3 remote play capability and other rich multimedia functionality. It was an European debut and many were glad to see Sony Ericsson returning to truly innovative features and design.
SonyStyle is now offering the Aino for the US market at the crisp price of $600, which is also the same price as the Sony Ericsson W995a Walkman phone. While I applaud Sony bringing the phone to the US market as quickly as they could, it would have been a lot nicer to see a carrier pick this device up. If the Aino can’t find a carrier in the US, it may just end up performing like the XPERIA X1 did. Both are beautiful devices, but carry an extremely high price tag and fall out of interest in the average consumer if they can’t be subsidized in price and tied to a one or two year plan. However, with such features as an included bluetooth headset Flash Lite support, wide codec support, Wifi, preloaded applications (like facebook, twitter, accuweather), 8.1 megapixel camera, etc maybe people will be seeking this out regardless.
We only saw one color available in the SonyStyle listing, which was the Obsidian Black.
Here’s hoping we see the Aino on a carrier soon.
