The Ion runs a custom Sony overlay on top of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), which it calls Timescape. The Timescape overlay looks similar to the one we've seen on previous Xperia phones, though it adds a handful of widgets and tweaks that change the look and feel of Gingerbread to (rather poorly) imitate the holographic UI found in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). The changes include a new app drawer and customizable four-icon dock at the bottom of all five of the overlay's home screens.

The Ion was running Gingerbread at CES, and I'm disappointed that, six months after its debut, Sony didn't ship it with Ice Cream Sandwich. According to the documentation accompanying the phone, the Ion is upgradable to Ice Cream Sandwich--but there's no reason why the phone couldn't have shipped with the newer OS in the first place. It doesn't help that the overlay on the Ion makes actions such as rearranging apps and widgets feel clunky and imprecise, or that certain widgets (such as the social widget) look jagged on the phone's high-resolution display.

Like most other Android phones, the Ion comes with its share of preinstalled applications (commonly termed "bloatware"), though you can uninstall almost all of them.