Sony Ericsson Satio

The Sony Ericsson Satio is a smartphone that hails from Sony Ericsson’s corporate line targeted at higher end users. It allows you to talk with pictures, tap directly into your favourite music and movies using the unique touch panels as well as use the touchscreen camera feature to focus and make every photo first-class.

Specifications
The Sony Ericsson Satio measures 112.0 mm x 55.0 mm x 13.0 mm in (H x W x D) in dimension and weighs approximately 126 g. It is available in Black, Silver and Bordeaux. There is a TFT touchscreen with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels that can support up to 1677721 colours. Not only that, the display has a 16:9 widescreen ratio and measures 3.5 inches diagonally. In terms of memory, the Sony Ericsson Satio is compatible with SanDisk microSD memory cards. Compatible networks include GSM/ GPRS/ EDGE (850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900 MHz) as well as UMTS/ HSPA (850/ 900/ 1900/ 2100 MHz). Among some of its key features include its 12.1 mega pixel camera with Xenon flash and intuitive touch focus to provide high-resolution shots that can be blown up big. Besides that, the digital camera can also perform digital zoom of up to 16x. Other camera feature include face detection, BestPic, Photo fix, imgae stabiliser, send to web, red-eye reduction, video light, geo-tagging, smile detection, video recording and touch capture. It also has a ‘Magic Touch’ feature that allows you to access all your favourite applications with just a touch of a finger. Users can tap directly into TV series, mobile videos, podcasts and music via the ingenious full-touch media menu. In terms of entertainment features, the Sony Ericsson Satio puts all your media content in one place for fast and easy access. In addition to that, there are also 3D games, YouTube video streaming capabilities, Java, Video viewing, Video streaming and Radio reception. As for communication features, the Sony Ericsson Satio has speakerphone abilities, vibrating alert, and video calling capabilities.  The Sony Ericsson Satio sports a design that supports gesture control that allows you to silence a call or alarm by simply moving your hand across the camera lense. It also has support for wallpaper animation, picture wallpaper and auto rotate that switches from vertical to horizontal mode when you rotate the phone to suit whatever you are viewing. Not only that, the Sony Ericsson Satio also has music tones support for Mp3 and AAC. There is also an embedded media player for music playback and video playback. Not only that, the Sony Ericsson Satio also supports album art that allows you to choose music by browsing CD album arts of other images. Other music features include Bluetooth stereo (A2DP), PlayNow and TrackID that helps you to identify the name of the track, artist and album which will be sent to your phone after a few seconds of the song is recorded. In terms of connectivity, the Sony Ericsson Satio features aGPS, Google Maps, Bluetooth technology, Modem, Synchronisation, USB support, USB mass storage, WiFi and PictBridge. As for internet features, the Sony Ericsson Satio features WebKit based browsers, and web feeds. Messaging features include email, Exchange ActiveSync, text messaging (SMS), picture messaging (MMS), instant messaging (IM), predictive text input and sound recorder. For added conveniences, there are also organiser functions including handwriting recognition that turns whatever you have written as you would with a pen into digital text, a touchscreen to navigate menus and select onscreen items using a stylus or fingertip, alarm clock, calendar, calculator, flight mode, notes, Symbian OS, phone book, document readers and document editors.

Reviews

“The Satio is a good phone, there’s no doubt about that. The sheer amount of technology under the hood is testament to a good design team, and we can see a lot of photography lovers seeing it as their must-have phone. However, the amount of little problems (as well as the big ones, like a poor touchscreen at times and no 3.5mm headphone jack) all add up quickly, and it’s a shame as we wanted to Satio to be one of the biggest devices of the year. It might well still be, but it’s not going to challenge the top dogs for phone of the year or anything – we’re still waiting to see how good Sony Ericsson’s Android offering will be, as that could be the turning point for the company.” (TechRadar, 2009)

“The Sony Ericsson Satio lost the race for the first 12MP cameraphone on the market, but maybe it’s not too late to win the race for widespread adoption. There’s certainly a great deal of hype around it and the phone manages to live up to a lot of it. Of course it will be up to the mid-range reinforcements to follow Satio, Aino and Rachael to claw back some of the market share the company has lost over the last couple of years. But things may as well be looking brighter already with Satio leading the way.” (GSMArena, 2009)