In the wake of announcing a pair of new laptops, the new owners of Vaio have decided to enter the smartphone market with a model that rivals Sony's Xperia series. The appropriately named Vaio Phone will launch March 20 in Japan through one of the country's smaller carriers, b-mobile, reports Digital Trends.

Vaio seems to have kept its best designers busy with the flagship laptop series because the company's first smartphone is nothing spectacular. The design is similar to the Nexus 4. There's an all glass rear panel that includes the Vaio logo across the top. The soft-touch body shell is black and glossy. It's an unassuming mobile phone.

The operating system is Android 5.0, untouched. Users will appreciate the lack of custom user interface that could mess with the greatness of Material Design. The VAIO phone sports a five-inch, 720p display, Android 5.0, a rear 13-megapixel camera, 2GB of RAM and an unnamed 1.2GHz quad-core processor. In addition, the cell phone has a 5-megapixel selfie camera, a 2500mAh battery, 16GB of internal memory and a MicroSD card slot.

The Vaio phone is being sold unlocked in Japan for around $420, or 51,000 yen. It is also available with unlimited data via contract for about $33, or 4,000 yen, per month.

Investment fund Japan Industrial Partners, who bought Vaio from Sony in early 2014, said its laptops would likely never be sold outside the country, and it seems the Vaio Phone will have a similar fate, according to Digital Trends.

It is interesting to note that Panasonic's Eluga U2, which launched February in Taiwan, is nearly identical to the Vaio Phone. The smartphone has the same specs and design, except it boasts a 1080p resolution screen. It sells for a fraction of the Vaio Phone price.

Sony created PC business Vaio in 1996. Vaio offered slick computers that rivaled Dell and HP until the company slowly declined in recent years.