Sony Ericsson Satio
Satio is Sony Ericsson’s much hyped phone that was first announced at the Mobile World Congress in 2009. The Symbian-powered phone was initially named as Idou and was launched few months after it was put up for preview. Sony Ericsson’s high end phone packs a powerful 12.1 megapixel camera, which becomes more apparent looking at its rear and runs on S60 5th edition Symbian OS. Sony Ericsson Satio is the fusion of the company’s bestseller Walkman and Cybershot brands. Whether this fusion will help Sony Ericsson to break the jinx and become a leading entertainment phone seller, remains to be seen.
The handset has good call quality, with no audibility issues. The multimedia phone plays videos nicely without any jitter, though you cannot play files in the DivX or AVI format. Considering the fact it runs on Symbian OS, it is not as fast as iPhone or Android phones, but given to the limitations, it does its job pretty well. Thanks to its WebKit browser along with the 3G and Wi-Fi web browsing and downloading is pretty fast on the phone. The 12.1-megapixel camera shoots some stellar pictures thanks to the high-resolution camera. It comes with a number of shooting modes that make a world of difference to the image quality. It also has a dedicated shooting mode along with flash that gives brighter images in dark conditions. It can record good quality videos without any lag at 30 fps. Its 1,000mAh lithium ion battery, however, is not powerful enough to support all these multimedia features all day long.
Satio is a multimedia phone that offers 3G speeds up to 7.2 Mbps. Its 3.5-inch display offers ample workspace from web browsing to watching movies. What powers it underneath is a ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz CPU and PowerVR SGX dedicated graphics accelerator. It has Wi-Fi and WebKit browser, which will give high quality web browsing experience. It comes with Sony’s standard Walkman player, which allows you to create on-the-fly playlists and shuffle between the songs. You can play MPEG4, WMV, 3GP, and ASF video files on the phone and listen to your favorite music on the FM radio. It comes with TrackID and PlayNow that help you identify any track playing around you and download games, music and more form Sony’s apps portal.
Satio comes with 68MB user memory the can be expanded up to 16GB with microSD. The most intriguing feature of the phone is its 12.1-megapixel camera that shoots images at a high resolution and has a number of editing options to further improve the quality of the images. The camera is supported by Xenon and LED flash and, it offers 16x digital zoom too. You can shoot images in five different modes including BestPic, which takes nine pictures in one second. It records videos at 30 frames per second. It comes with some handy set of applications, such as Wisepilot and Office document viewer, which would help you with navigation and office work. It supports all this on a 1000mAh battery.
Satio comes in a rectangular shape with black and silver accents. What you’ll see in front is the 3.5-inch display with three small buttons lying below it colored green, white and red. The display supports a resolution of 360×640 pixels with the color-depth of up to 16.7 million colors. This means you’ll be looking at a bright and vivid display, which is a joy to work on. Despite all its gadgetry, it is very lightweight and weighs just 4.4 ounces. The handset boards a massive camera at the back and a front camera for video chatting. Most of the buttons lie on the sides including a slider, port for USB connection and a microSD slot on the left and all the buttons that perform different camera functions along with a volume rocker on the right. Its resistive touch screen doesn’t always respond well and as usual with Sony Ericsson phones, it doesn’t have a 3.5mm audio jack either.
Satio is a good multimedia phone that offers fantastic photography. Its multimedia basics are pretty solid except the fact that it cannot play the DivX and AVI files. However, it being a Symbian phone without any 3.5 mm audio jack, doesn’t go in its favor. A number of phones surpass Satio in many ways, and that too, at a much cheaper price (e.g. Samsung OMNIA HD). Go for Satio only if you’re looking for a phone that offers fantastic photography, otherwise, you have other better options to choose from.
