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Former Sony laptop brand Vaio has announced its first ever smartphone.
There had been rumours of such a device towards the end of last year, and they have continued to crop throughout 2015. Earlier in the month, it emerged that a Vaio smartphone had been certified in Japan.
Now the news is official. The Vaio laptop brand that Sony sold in early 2014, and that returned to operate in its local market in July of the same year, has announced a smartphone.
The Vaio phone is a fairly unassuming (if glossy) black slab of a phone that is being sold through Japanese network B-mobile. There's a defintie hint of the Nexus 4 in there.
It's a mid-ranger on the spec front, with a 5-inch 720p display, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and a 13-megapxiel camera. Perhaps most alluringly, it runs what appears to be a stock version of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
Related: 11 Best Android Phones and Smartphones
As pointed out by Blog of mobile (via Engadget), the Vaio smartphone is effectively a reskin of a pre-existing handset, the Panasonic's Eluga U2. Which pretty much sums up how un-special and by the book this Japan-only phone seems to be.
It's a far cry from Vaio's premium laptop-brand heyday, but then we all knew it wasn't that kind of company anymore, didn't we?