Sony Ericsson Satio,12.1 Megapixel Multimedia Phone

SONY ERICSSON announced its flagship 12.1 megapixel camera phoneway back in February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where many of the year's new handsets were unveiled for the first time. The mobile was then known as Iduo, though at the end of May the company renamed it as Sony Ericsson Satio.

On first impressions the handset has an almost Bakelite phone appearance, from those house phones of yesteryear with its matte black finish and solid build. It feels a good weight in the hand - just right for a digital camera that happens to be a mobile phone at the same time, as let's face it, that's what it really is.

Its 3.5-inch 640x360 resolution resistive touchscreen has a clean and sharp viewing quality, while being fairly responsive to the touch on most occasions. There were some instances where the phone got lag or a gesture not actioned by the touchscreen. I believe this may have been down to the OS, rather than the touch display being unresponsive. Selecting menu options and typing on the virtual keyboard were best performed with the top of the finger rather than the very tip, as anything else was a bit hit and miss on the Satio.

The Symbian S60 5th Edition mobile operating system runs this phone, which isn't the best version of that OS we've seen on a handset. It'srather clumsy, lacking in frills and is a very basic interpretation of that Nokia owned software platform.

It is almost as if Sony Ericsson ran out of money in developing the phone when it threw the whole budget into the camera, then barely developed the OS as a result. It's a harsh criticism, but one we feel we have to make after regularly using Nokia's S60 5th Edition phones, such as the N97 and X6. Despite those mobiles running the same platform, their GUI is 100 per cent better, far friendlier, more feature laden and easier to use as compared to the Satio's deployed version.

The phone's GUI has clearly been influenced by Google's Android, as it has a few different screens alongside the home screens used for housing the most frequently used functions such as contacts, messaging and theviewing of pictures. Pressing the green call button on the Satio only produces a list of missed calls, dialled calls and recent calls. You can only access the dialler from an icon on the main home screen.

The camera aspect of the phone, or the whole the reason many will buy the phone, is rather good at 12.1 megapixels. In most cases photos taken were clear and sharp, although a steady hand is needed when taking a shot, as even the slightest unsteadiness shows up much more clearly on the larger image.

With the average size of a 12.1MP image being close to 3MB, the 8GB bundled in microSD card comes in handy as the phone has only 128MB of onboard memory. There are good features surrounding the image taking capabilities of the camera phone, not ones really aimed at the professional photographer but more aimed at the casual snapper. 

Using Xenon Flash

These include autofocus, red-eye reduction, face detection, smile detection and best picture quality. These are all just minor tools to use, rather than anything too taxing or advanced for the average punter.
Sony Ericsson has also included 16X digital zoom and a Xenon Flash that aids in producing decent images, although the zoom didn't produce the better quality we've come to expect from a higher megapixel camera.The images taken with the Satio seem a bit hit and miss in terms of quality.

Video was a bit of a letdown on the Satio, both in capturing and in playback. The handset is only capable of video recording at a VGA resolution, where we really expected something more. Perhaps not full 1080p, but somewhere beneath just to show the full potential of the camera phone and what it could offer. Video playback has no support for DivX/XviD or any AVI, only Realmedia and mp4 file extensions.

The Satio 1000mAh battery was put to the test over a day's use, whereyou can still manage to get 8 hours of calls from the phone before the handset dies, all while taking 12.1 megapixel photo shots here and there, which really didn't make as huge an impact on the battery as one would have thought.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt the Satio is a good sign of change at Sony Ericsson and perhaps a glimpse at what’s to come, not only from Sony Ericsson but all the manufacturers. But there’s no such thing as being perfect,and that’s definitely not something I’d call the Satio either. It’s still got a lot of stuff that annoys me and features that are missing, but it’s still avery good mix of features.

The camera is undoubtedly one of the prime features of the Satio and I reckon many people would buy or consider buying the phone purely because of the camera. Swedish magazine Tidningen Mobil ( a specialist magazine featuring hot news and articles regarding mobile devices and gadgets ) awarded the Sony Ericsson Satio its award for Best Camera Phone.The award was announced at the Mobilgalan event at the Kista Science Tower. Another positive side of the Satio is its media functionality, which is without a doubt among the best of its class. Sony Ericsson’s Media application works brilliantly, and although it lacks a few features.