Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Sony Ericsson Satio

The design is fairly faultless. With a touchscreen, it is hard to do anything much with the front of the phone, so Sony hasn't tried. The results are good though; apart from the screen, the front only has three slim hardware buttons along the bottom edge. The top has all the sensors, like proximity and light, with the video conferencing camera and an LED status light. 

The sides are dedicated to camera functionality and other miscellaneous requirements like charging and a micro SD card slot. 

The back could be mistaken for any digital camera doing rounds in the market. The 12 megapixel camera has a sliding hatch to protect it and its accoutrements from dust and damage. It looks great. 

The most amazing feature of the Sony Ericsson Satio is the camera: 12 megapixels is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it comes bundled in a phone. The camera can a Xenon flash, instead of the run-of-the-mill LED one, and a small light that is used to focus on objects. One whole side of the phone is dedicated to camera controls as a matter of fact; there is the camera button, a button to switch camera modes, and the volume rocker switch doubles up as zoom. There is a new gimmick called touch focus that is packaged with this phone; the user clicks on the object that they want to focus on, and there remains no need to center the phone.

The music player is a little simplistic and disappointing, considering has been made by Sony. It could have done with a few more features, and the audio output leaves a little to be desired. However, the music player also has its very own button to start music without having to extract the phone from any receptacles. The video player is little better, with a few options to view videos in fullscreen or in the original aspect ratio. The phone currently does not support either xvid or divx video formats.

The Satio is the first Sony Ericsson phone to sport the latest Symbian mobile operating system, Touch edition. However, the user interface has been tweaked to keep the design integrity seen in previous Sony phones. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, considering the Symbian interface is decidedly dated. There are five homescreens, each accessible by sliding from one to another. In case of quick access, there are also five buttons that line the main screen. 

The first screen lists the phone's contacts; when a contact is clicked, a pop-up menu shows three interaction means available with that contact. The second screen lists the user's most-often visited websites. The third and middle screen is the default homescreen. It contains the links to go further into the phone's system, like menu keys and the phone dialing screen. The fourth homescreen is essentially a gallery where photographs can be viewed. The last screen is a shortcut menu which is entirely customizable. 

The phone has four methods of input: firstly, there is handwriting recognition which takes place in a small window; the second is a full QWERTY keyboard that is aligned to landscape; the third is a compact version of the QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode; and the last is the standard alphanumeric keypad. 

There is microSD slot at the side. This is a new addition to Sony Ericsson phones, and a concession to standardization. Earlier Sony insisted on using cards that would not work on other multimedia devices, so this makes for a welcome change.

The web browser supports Java and Flash, and with the widescreen option available, surfing the information superhighway is a cinch. 

Connectivity is standard across the board, with quad-band GSM and HSDPA. There is GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth support. The phone also has GPS with the option to upgrade to A-GPS as well. 

The phone has released only this month, so word of its performance hasn't percolated. As of now there seems to be no trouble, with websites loading quickly, transitions between screens smooth and multimedia playback being completely seamless. 

The Sony Ericsson is an expensive phone. The camera is of a high resolution, certainly, but considering the optics that have gone into the construction, optical zoom would have been far better. The multimedia playback is disappointing too. 

However, the phone is very attractive. The other features, like the web browser and the set up of the user interface is very smooth and intuitive. 

It is Sony Ericsson's first all-in-one device, and while it's a good effort, it would be worth the wait for the next in the lineup.