Launched earlier last year, the Sony Ericsson Satio was created to bring the best and most popular features of Sony Ericsson phones, ie the Walkman and Cybershot series. The Satio has on board one of the most powerful cameras ever launched by the phonemaker and on paper it is still to date a strong contender to many other cameraphones available on the high streets. Not only did Sony Ericsson decide to throw in their most popular functionalities into one phone, they also decided to put in their new UI, was this going to be a nice Sony Ericsson cocktail or was it a risky gamble?

Design

When we first got to check out the Satio, our first impression of its design was that it was very bulky. We felt Sony Ericsson, which has been more than capable of making much more slimmer phones in the past had opt out of its slim line phones and gone back to the drawing board! This was probably made even worse by the lack of smooth corners. It looks glossy (which many people do like) and feels pretty plastic to hold, all this houses the 3.5-inch touchscreen and at the top of the screen, you will see that the Satio sports a front facing camera for video calls. Despite the apparent size, it was in fact lighter in weight than we expected, approximately 10 grams lighter than the iPhone 3GS.

While the Satio was rather thick and not the greatest or most comfortable to hold, we could see that Sony Ericsson had made good use of buttons and keys along the sides of the Satio. Being a heavily, multimedia focussed mobile phone, the Satio left sided keys as seen in the picture above have all been designed to support its camera functionality. The ‘trigger key’ for locking and unlocking the screen was practical, though as you can see in the picture below, the Satio does not sport a 3.5mm which was certainly a disappointment we did not expect for a new smartphone of its calibre.

Touchscreen Display

We enjoyed and had no problems whatsoever with the Satio’s 3.5″ touchscreen display. Its bright, had good viewing angles, rich in colour with good clarity. Unfortunately its not a capacitive screen but a resistive one. Within the package was also a stylus and we found ourselves having to use it quite often. The problem with the touchscreen was if you wanted to use your finger to control its menus or type messages, you’d find yourself having to press quite hard which meant inaccuracy and time wasted pressing the on-screen keys which you didn’t actually want to press.

New User Interface

If you’re used to using Sony Ericsson phones, the Satio’s new UI (Symbian OS v9.4) shouldn’t be difficult for you. Its not in fact a huge change as such but visually we reckon it has been a noticeble improvement. The UI is easily accessible even at first hands on, media files, apps, music player and phone settings are all within a few taps away. The downside to the Satio’s UI is that it is rather slow to boot up when you first switch it on, much like the first generation iPhone. But otherwise it is smooth to browse along, it has elastic menus just like any smartphone’s UI nowadays.

The below picture demonstrates one of the five shortcut screens you get from the homepage menu.

The centre key at the bottom of the phone brings you into its main menu. A good function worth pointing out is that the Satio’s UI allows applications / functions to run in the background (indicated by the green circles to the right of the icons in the picture below). Applications that are running in the background can be quickly accessed by holding onto the centre key for two seconds.

Click here to continue reading the next section of this review…

Pages: 1 2