Sony Ericsson have long ago shown that they are not afraid of any challenge, producing handsets that have claimed a top spot on the market. There are still plenty of fans from those good old days that would love to see another market-leading device thrown their way.
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A look at what’s between the XPERIA X1 and the Satio is enough to tell you what Sony Ericsson have been up to for the past year. A top-dog Cybershot (C905) and an all-round Walkman (W995) were both compelling enough but none would be trusted to top the portfolio of a company that used to call the shots at the forefront of mobile technology.
So, Sony Ericsson might have been busy cutting costs, fueling the hype behind their new wave gadgets (Satio, Aino and Rachael) or experimenting with Symbian and Android. But there’s little doubt about their full-time job. The Satio is a lot more than its mouthwatering features, full touchscreen debuting Symbian S60 or its 12 megapixel camera. It may be too much to say that all the company’s hopes lie with the Satio but the burden on its shoulders is disproportionate compared to any other flagship device we can think of.
سعر سونى اريكسون SonyEricsson Satio (Idou) Price
Sony Ericsson Satio official photos
This review, by the way, is coming after a massive spoiler. But the good thing is we know the Satio is all geared and ready to face some serious challenges. An industry leading cameraphone, or top-of-the-line smartphone, the Satio has a clear view of its goal. But you can be certain that its path forward will not be covered in rose petals. Sony Ericsson are in dire need of fresh devices (and cash) and the Satio should not be anything but a bestseller. When you’re trying to turn your fortunes around, you have very little room for error.
Key features
- 3.5″ 16M-color resistive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution
- 12 megapixel state-of-the-art autofocus camera
- LED and xenon flash, active lens cover
- VGA@30fps video recording
- Symbian OS 9.4 with S60 5th edition UI, spiced up with a home-brewed homescreen and media menu
- ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz CPU, PowerVR SGX dedicated graphics accelerator and 256 MB of RAM
- Quad-band GSM support
- 3G with HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 3.6 Mbps support
- Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS
- microSD card slot (up to 32GB)
- Built-in accelerometer
- TV out
- Stereo FM Radio with RDS
- USB and stereo Bluetooth v2.0
- Web browser has full Flash support
- Preinstalled Wisepilot navigation software
- Office document viewer
Main disadvantages
- Xenon flash is not adequately powerful
- The S60 5th edition UI isn’t to the best in class standards
- No 3.5mm audio jack or a standard USB port
- No DivX or XviD support out-of-the-box
- No smart or voice dialing
- Playing flash videos in the browser easily depletes the available RAM
- No office document editing (without a paid upgrade)
- No stereo speakers
- No digital compass (magnetometer)
There’s very little to complain about looking at the list above, but the difference between a moderately successful handset and a blockbuster depends on all the performance you can squeeze out of those features. And with the Symbian S60 touch reincarnation hardly the most heralded OS on the market, the job gets even more complicated.
سعر سونى اريكسون SonyEricsson Satio (Idou) Price
Sony Ericsson Satio at ours
The competition is at an all-time high in the premium segment, Sony Ericsson won’t enter the battle unarmed. The sleek Satio knows it has a trick or two up its sleeves and is eager to show the world its worth. And here we are revealing those secrets for you, starting with the design and handling on the next page.
Design and construction (continued)
The right side hosts an array of controls. The three located towards the bottom are all camera-related. There’s a nicely responsive shutter key with distinct half-press for autofocus, a button to toggle camera modes and a dedicated gallery key. The volume rocker is further up and it isn’t totally irrelevant to imaging either, as it doubles as a zoom lever.
A host of camera controls on the right side of the handset
The power key of the Sony Ericsson Satio is placed at the top, right next to the loudspeaker. As on any other Symbian handset, you can also use the power key for switching profiles on the device.
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The power key and loudspeaker are on top
All there is at the bottom is the lanyard eyelet.
The lanyard is attached at the bottom
سعر سونى اريكسون SonyEricsson Satio (Idou) Price
The back of the Sony Ericsson Satio reveals its other standout feature. The 12 megapixel camera lens is underneath the stylish cover , accompanied by both xenon and a LED flash. The dual flash solution makes sure the Satio is covered in low-light conditions for both stills and video recording. There are also a couple of tiny apertures around the camera lens, which we guess are some kind of light sensors.
The star of the show: 12 megapixel autofocus camera
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Having seen the Satio in action in our recent 12 megapixel shootout, praises for the image quality will hardly be a spoiler. The imaging performance is impressive and we’ll gladly shoot a few more rounds with the Satio in the camera chapter of this review.
Removing the battery cover on the Satio reveals the 1000 mAh Li-Po BST-33 battery. BST-33 batteries are nominally 900 mAh so we’re wondering where did those additional 100 mAh get from, but the pure specs are not the point.
Considering the screen size, you can hardly expect miracles from it, but it still managed to last through the day even if we never gave it a break. Since we doubt it any of you will be taking a hundred photos a day and endlessly fiddling with the other phone features, you have good reason to expect a longer gap between charges.
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We have to mention that Sony Ericsson have gone for a strange solution for the SIM compartment on the Satio. You place the card on a small plastic tray, which slides in under the lens cover. It’s probably a neat trick to save some space but the plastic tray looks pretty fragile. If you’re in the habit of frequently changing SIM cards you should be careful.
Taking a peek inside Satio
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Summing it up, the general build quality of the Satio is quite good and the materials used are both nice looking and durable. The handset feels perfect in the hand and, despite being a bit thicker at the top, it is evenly weighted so there is no risk of it slipping out of your hand.
The ample touchscreen is a treat in terms of image quality, and the response is quite pleasing. The camera controls are very user-friendly, and the active lens cover does well to both enhance the imaging experience and highlight the phone’s key feature. Our main concerns with the Satio are the absence of a standard USB port and 3.5 mm audio jack.
سعر سونى اريكسون SonyEricsson Satio (Idou) Price
The Sony Ericsson Satio held in hand
To sum it up, there a few hardware issues, which are not make-or-break perhaps, but still a nuisance in a high-end device. Ergonomics are quite up to scratch though and the Satio handles nicely.
Interface
سعر سونى اريكسون SonyEricsson Satio (Idou) Price
Sony Ericsson Satio runs the Symbian OS 5th edition but you’d never tell by just looking at the homescreen. It’s a clean break from how other manufacturers see the touch-operated Symbian.
The homescreen uses a tabbed interface but not like the “Vertical icon bar” often seen (though rarely used) in Nokia handsets. There are five tabs, which are in effect five alternative homescreen panes: favorite contacts, bookmarks, home, photos, shortcuts.
The S60 5th edition homescreen has grown tabs
There are five shortcuts on the top of the display, one for each tab. Alternatively, horizontal finger sweeps can be used to navigate between the tabs. The transition itself is visually pleasing with its smooth animations – even if you switch from the first to the last tab, things will roll across the screen with no lag at all.
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The other four tabs of the homescreen
The home tab is a typical homescreen – wallpaper, operator name, time and date (though time is also visible in the status row on top) and music controls. The music controls act as a shortcut to the music player and if there’s a song playing it will display track info (with album art) and basic player controls. There are four additional shortcuts at the bottom – Dialer, Media, Messaging and Web search.
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The home tab is placed in the center. The leftmost tab is the favorite contacts tab, which gives quick access to a selection of contacts. They are displayed in a list with contact photos if available, so nothing fancy. Tapping a contact, brings up a popup with three options – Call, Message, View in contacts.
The second tab is the bookmarks and it does what it says. You can add new links but you can have eight at most. Another thing we would’ve liked is favicons in the list.
The fourth tab – photos – shows a vertical list of all your photos, sorted by date. It comes with kinetic scrolling and is the fastest way to view the latest photos.
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The fifth tab is the shortcuts tab and holds a list of eight shortcuts – be they shortcuts to applications or bookmarks.
The main menu is more standard – there’s a choice between a grid and list arrangement, and by default the shortcuts are arranged so that they resemble the typical Sony Ericsson menu. The icons will feel very familiar to experienced Sony Ericsson users.
The main menu
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The rest however is S60 5th edition – the D-pad and soft-key based navigation translated into touchscreen. Lists still require a double tap to select and confirm, while icons take just a single tap. There’s a shortcut to the task switcher or you can long-press the menu key.
Best or second best, the Satio camera is a standard-setter
The Sony Ericsson Satio packs one of the first 12 megapixel cameras in the mobile phone world and we did a head-to-head shootout with the other 12MP camera phone – the Samsung Pixon12. With maximum image resolution of 4000 x 3000 pixels, both xenon and LED flash, it makes basic point-and-shoot cameras look obsolete.
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The Satio camera interface is reasonably comfortable with the viewfinder occupying only the central part of the screen when regular 4:3 aspect ratio is selected. When shooting in 16:9 aspect ratio (9MP), however, the whole display is put to use from side to side.
On the right side of the viewfinder there are five shortcuts. Those include Scenes, Shoot mode, Flash settings, Exposure compensation and Auto mode. When you select Auto mode the handset takes care to select the most appropriate scene mode for each of your photos and apply the proper settings.
Camera interface • camcorder interface
Opening the settings menu gives you quite a load of customizable options. Those include focus mode, white balance, effects, image stabilizer and self-timer. You can also choose whether you’ll see a preview of every taken snapshot and if the image orientation should be recorded in the EXIF info. The camcorder part of the camera supports a very similar set of customizable settings.سعر سونى اريكسون SonyEricsson Satio (Idou) Price
A high-end cameraphone, the Sony Ericsson Satio naturally comes with image geo-tagging too. There is also face and smile-detection onboard, as well as panorama mode and Touch capture.
As the name suggests, Touch capture allows you to focus on any particular subject in the frame by simply tapping on it in the viewfinder. The Satio will automatically focus on it and take a shot.
The mechanical lens cover offers the best possible protection for the lens. Also, it’s an active one – that means that sliding it open launches the camera even if the phone is locked.
The other mechanical shortcuts that work with the camera besides the shutter key are the volume rocker for digital zoom control, a gallery shortcut and a button that toggles between still image capture and video recording.
Image quality
If you are interested in finding out everything there is to know about the image quality of the Sony Ericsson Satio please check out our 12 megapixel shootout article. There you’ll find a pretty detailed analysis of the two best cameras on a mobile phone currently on the market.
To summarize though, the Sony Ericsson Satio produces splendid images that are well beyond the output of any of its 8 megapixel rivals. The colors are vibrant and saturated, the amount of resolved detail is great and the noise levels are tolerable.
While the Pixon12 did have a small edge in image quality and xenon flash performance,the Satio has its own strengths as well. Simply said, the Sony Ericsson smartphone is some optical zoom away from matching low-end and mid-range digicam performance but we guess you can’t have it all just yet.
And here are some samples from the Sony Ericsson Satio camera, some of which you won’t find in the shootout.
Sony Ericsson Satio camera samples
Video recording
The Sony Ericsson Satio will produce VGA videos at 30 fps, equaling the XPERIA X1 achievement. Some of the issues we had with the prerelease Satio unit were ironed out and now everything is up to scratch.
The quality of the videos is really good with an almost unmatched amount of resolved detail, very good contrast and precise colors. While the HD capabilities of the Samsung Omnia HD are out of reach, the Satio is definitely among the top contenders for the world title in the VGA category.
Here is a Sony Ericsson Satio camera video sample for you to enjoy.
Connectivity is full suite
Sony Ericsson Satio is well versed in connectivity – all contemporary means of data transfer are supported.
Starting with the basics, there’s quad-band GSM and EDGE support, as well as 3G network compatibility. The Satio has dual-band 900/2100 MHz support for worldwide coverage, as well as an American version at 850/1900/2100 MHz. Data speeds are quite high with 7.2Mbps HSDPA and 3.6Mbps HSUPA.
Local connectivity offers the obligatory Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP. Satio also comes with Wi-Fi, which includes DLNA support. Oh, and there’s the wired connectivity, which unfortunately makes use of only the proprietary Fast Port connector.
This Sony Ericsson has gone with with microSD cards recently, not Memory Sticks. The card slot on the Satio is is hot-swappable and easily accessible – it’s hidden under a flap on the left side of the phone. It supports cards with a capacity of up to 16GB (it comes with an 8GB card in the box), which is more free space than we’ve ever needed.
Web browser has Flash but disappoints in usability
Sony Ericsson Satio uses the S60 5th edition browser and starts up with the typical Sony Ericsson homepage.
It has quite a few shortcomings in usability though. The kinetic scrolling for one – it doesn’t have enough momentum and stops way too abruptly. The tap-to-zoom feature switches between three levels of zoom: 30%, 100% and 200%. Strangely, it was a little hard to trigger, so you are better off using the zoom bar.
Viewing a page full screen or bringing up the minimap requires two taps, which is exactly a click more than it should have been. And while the browser has support for multiple pages opened at the same time, this only works for popups – you can’t open a new tab manually and dial in a new web address.
The web browser
At least the page rendering is quite good, making all the pages look as if browsed on a desktop PC. The high resolution is also a welcome bonus here, as it allows more content to fit on the screen. There is also a login auto-fill interface that really makes logging online that much easier on a device without a physical keyboard.
Finally, the web browser has full support for both Flash and Java, which means that you can enjoy flash videos straight in your browser without having to use the mobile versions of sites like YouTube.
In terms of speed the browser performs very well but when viewing a YouTube video it would often show a “memory low” warning. The videos still played smoothly though.
So, generally speaking, the second S60 touch-browser is nicely equipped but fails to address some basic usability shortcomings.
Games department offers two puzzles
There are two games preinstalled on the Satio – Labyrinth and Sudoku. Labyrinth has the same premise as HTC’s Teeter game – by tilting the phone, you guide a ball to an end point avoiding traps along the way.
There are some new obstacles on the way but the essence is the same. The maze is rendered in 3D and the camera shifts position as you tilt the phone. Unfortunately, it does so with noticeable lag, which somewhat breaks the illusion.
Tee… uh, we mean Labyrinth
The second game Sudoku is self-explanatory. It introduces a slight RPG element by letting you create a character with which you can earn prizes and trophies displayed on a shelf in a virtual cafe. You can create or join online cafes to show off your trophies. There’s also an extensive tutorial in case you’ve never played Sudoku before.
Sudoku will eat up your free time
GPS navigation talks you through
The Sony Ericsson Satio features a built-in GPS receiver. Its sensitivity is nothing spectacular – it managed to get a lock from a cold start in a couple of minutes but we had to go out into an open area. It wouldn’t get a lock on the balcony of our office.
The Satio is equipped with a Wisepilot navigation software and offers all the features you’d expect from a proper SatNav solution. There’s voice-guided walk and drive navigation, maps are courtesy of NAVTEQ, there’s 3D view of the maps, extensive route-planning settings, speed camera alerts, POI and weather.
Wisepilot navigation software
Its main downside is that maps are not stored locally but instead are downloaded over the air. A flat data fee is recommended but 1MB of data should get you about 600km of navigation. Still, we would have liked to have a map downloader as well, like with Nokia Maps. It really would have helped in avoiding data roaming charges.
We also wish there was a built-in compass, like on most of its competitors, to facilitate navigation.
Google Maps is included as well if you prefer it.
Google Maps
Final words
Sony Ericsson need a winner right now and the Satio is the phone carrying the torch. It’s equipped with a 12-megapixel camera, which puts it in an elite club. It failed to become the founding member of the club – that title goes to the Samsung Pixon12 – but the Satio offers a level of extra versatility available only on smartphones.
Let’s look away from the camera for a moment though – we paid it plenty of attention in our 12-megapixel shootout. The smartphone capabilities do deserve praise as well.
The Satio runs on the same “engine” as the iPhone 3GS, Omnia HD, Palm Pre and Nokia N900 – an ARM Cortex A8 CPU running at 600MHz along with a PowerVR SGX graphics accelerator. Symbian OS is known to run merrily on much lower-clocked CPUs and with more horsepower it multitasks like a champ. It also sports a brand new look, which certainly helps.
But all that platform talk renders the obvious competitor of the Satio a bit obscure. Yes, the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 is currently the archrival but the 12-megapixel camera is the only ground where these two phones face off. Yes, the Pixon12 offers GPS voice-guided navigation and Wi-Fi, a WVGA AMOLED screen and smooth and silky TouchWiz – but it’s not as versatile and flexible as the Satio’s smartness. The Pixon12 beat the Satio in a pretty close game but it was the cameraphone that lost, not the smartphone.
Samsung M8910 Pixon12
When the Samsung M8920, the worldwide version of the Samsung W880 AMOLED 12M, finally comes out, pressure on the Satio will grow. The M8920 won’t be a smartphone either but optical zoom will sure tip the scales. Until then, have a look at our preview of the W880 to get a taste of what’s coming next year.
Samsung M8920
Going down a notch in the camera department, we find a whole bunch of 8-megapixel options.
The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a ready and willing candidate. Its camera is probably as impressive, but in another way – the still unmatched 720p video recording. The bigger (and AMOLED) screen is worth noting too.
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD
In fact, the real promise is in the recent stir-up at the high end of the Sony Ericsson portfolio. We guess, phones like the Satio and the much-awaited Rachael give credence to the company’s efforts for a comeback. The Sony Ericsson top dogs really need to pull their ranks together to stand up to the competition.
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.
