We check out the new flagship Symbian phone, the 12.1-megapixel Sony Ericsson Satio.
Sony Ericsson stopped by to give us some face time with their newest flagship device, the Sony Ericsson Satio. The Sony Ericsson Satio, which used to be the S/E Idou, is an all-touch tablet phone running the Symbian Foundation OS. Like the recent Nokia N97, the Sony Ericsson Satio will run Symbian S60 5th Edition. The theme and specific user interface will be somewhat different, but in our hands on time with the device we felt like the basic structure of the OS was the same. The phone uses a wide, 3.5-inch touchscreen. Like the N97, it's built at a 16:9 aspect ratio and uses 640 by 360 pixels.
Born to shoot
The key selling point on the Sony Ericsson Satio will undoubtedly be the high-resolution camera. Sony seems endlessly creative in their ability to integrate a stylish Cyber Shot device onto the back of the Sony Ericsson cell phones, and while the camera lens cover add significant bulk to the back of the Satio, the metal shell will hopefully provide some protection for the lens. The Sony Ericsson Satio features a 12-megapixel camera, and shooters will be able to touch focus using the phone's touchscreen. The camera also features a Xenon flash, and face and smile detection.
Getting our hands on
In our hands-on experience with the Sony Ericsson Satio, we were impressed by all of the individual features, but let down by the phone's interface as a whole. This was reminiscent of our experience with the Nokia N97, which runs on the same platform. Sony Ericsson is throwing a lot of support behind the Symbian Foundation by releasing a new flagship device running the Symbian OS with a touch interface, especially after last year's flagship device, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, ran Windows Mobile with Sony's own Panels interface, a completely different setup. We didn't love Panels, we thought it came up short of its promised goals, but if the WinMo Panels combo was only a tiny step forward, the Symbian touch interface is a big step back.
The best parts of the interface are clearly Sony designs. Sparkling multimedia menus with cross-bar action remind us of recent Walkman phones and the Sony Playstation 3 menus. The camera interface was touchable and nice looking, and the media players were all very clean and slick. These are the features Sony Ericsson does best.
For the more basic interface elements, things were messy. The main menu is bland and lifeless. The dialer and other basic calling screens lacked a modern look. We'd like to see some real improvements to make this a much more touchable phone. With its resistive touchscreen, we worry that we're going to have to keep a stylus handy while using the Sony Ericsson Satio, but the phone seemed just responsive enough in our hands on tests.
We didn't have a solid network connection, but the phone has a nice assortment of advanced Internet features built in. The Sony Ericsson Satio will get native Exchange ActiveSync support, which will help corporate users synchronize e-mail, contacts and calendars with their work servers. The phone will also have some sort of Instant Messaging capability on board, though we're sure if you don't like the included client you can download a third-party app for the Symbian OS.
Fun, fun, fun
The phone will use some sort of gesture control, though the company is going all out and claiming the Sony Ericsson Satio will be a motion gaming device. More likely, the phone will get some sort of media shake-to-shuffle features, or perhaps ringer control, like we've seen on similarly equipped Nokia devices. Also, the Satio will use the Symbian Webkit browser, though we didn't get a chance to load up any Web pages due to a lack of connection during our tests.
For multimedia fans, the Sony Ericsson Satio will come preloaded with an 8GB microSD card, and not a Sony Memory Stick Micro (M2) card. This is a welcome departure for Sony, though we're perplexed as to why the company is still sticking with the strange FastPort power plug design. Buyers will get a TV Out cable, but will also have to use Sony Ericsson's proprietary connector to use their own headphones, or to charge the phone. We'd like to see a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as miniUSB for charging. The Xperia X1 had both of these, so we don't think it's too much to ask.
Price and release date
The Sony Ericsson Satio will be launched in a few flavors, one of which features support for AT&T's 3G HSDPA radio bands. The phone will be available late this year, in Q4 2009, but Sony Ericsson has yet to come up with a price or specific release date.
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