AT A GLANCE
- 12.1 MP camera
- Wi-Fi enabled
- Touch-screen with stylus
- Symbian OS
- Proximity sensor (i.e. phone light turns off during a call when phone is being held against your ear)
Being quite a big fan of Sony Ericsson due to the reliability of my current 4-yr old Sony phone, I must admit that I had high expectations for the Satio. Unfortunately, the only "high" about this phone was the level of disappointment, and I was left unimpressed.
If it's a camera you're looking for in a phone, the Satio will exceed your expectations by far. This however is the only factor that really sets this phone apart, and only just manages to scrape it out of the "exceptionally irritating" list.
Rapidly proceeded downhill
The battery hardly lasts. The phone freezes constantly – it even did this once during a phonecall. From what I understand, most phones only really last around 2-3 days before needing to be recharged. The Satio hardly even lasted for longer than a 2-day stretch, and this is incredibly frustrating when it dies overnight and you miss your wake-up alarm.
The older Sony phones used to go into reserve battery power, and your alarm would go off even after the main phone power had died. The Satio's low-battery warning is rather useless, in that it only warns you about an hour or two before it is about to die - not very convenient at all if you're a deep-sleeper. So unless you're living the student life or working flexible hours, don't rely on this phone as your only morning alarm.
Although it is solid in shape with no irregular battery bulges and blobs, the Satio is actually quite a bulky phone in terms of overall size. This is great when you have to try and find it in an over-filled handbag, but once you've found it, you're going to need to put that handbag down because this phone needs both hands for operation. I found that attempting to hold and operate the phone in the same hand becomes cumbersome, and would be better suited to slightly larger hands.
On the upside...
The Satio comes with a 12.1 MP camera, which is both impressive and incredibly exciting. I quite enjoyed photographing day-to-day life objects and sharing these on the web. When sending images via multimedia message or to the web, the process is fast and efficient, and images are automatically resized in an instant. When uploaded to computer, the images are of an excellent quality, thanks to the high resolution digital camera.
This touch-screen phone comes with a stylus, making touch-screen usage a great deal easier. I managed to install a fun drawing app, and was impressed by the precision of the stylus when used for drawing. I usually carry a pen and notepad with me for those doodling, waiting-for-the-bus moments.
The drawing application was a great replacement for this, (temporarily), and I got quite creatively carried away with scribbling out doodles.
The phone has a contraption thingy inside it which detects motion. On doing some research, I discovered that this is called an "accelerometer". This allows you to play interactive motion-detecting games, and can also be used to set up certain actions according to phone shake and rotation.
Turn-ons
- 12.1 super-Mega-awesome-Pixels in digital camera quality.. what more do you need?! That tops most mid-range digital cameras out there.
- Large, excellent quality screen on which videos are amazing.
- Stylus makes touch-screen typing incredibly easy, not to mention faster.
Turn-offs
- Battery lasts for a maximum of 2 days, if that.
- Phone software tends to hang fairly often.
- Very few apps available for this specific handset. (Unless you are prepared to hack the phone software.)
Sad to say, my relationship with the Satio went sour faster than old milk, and after only 2 weeks I was quite ready to give this handset the boot.
