Sony Ericsson Satio

An entertainment phone launched by Sony Ericsson in 2010 is the Satio which adopts a styling that we’ve seen in plenty of other touchscreen handsets. It is rectangular in shape and it has a black finish with a couple of silver accents. It isn’t a very compact device since it measure 4.4 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches and it has a curb weight of 4.4 ounces.

The manufacture has equipped this model with a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen rather than installing a capacitive one, which means that it is not as responsive to touch. As a consequence, the phone isn’t as fast as it could have been but you do have the possibility to use the stylus which makes the user experience a little bit more satisfying.

The good news is that the screen manages to be very sharp and bright, being capable of revealing up to 16.7 million colors and has a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. The images are going to look quite nice on this screen, while the text will be easy to read. As for the choice of keyboards, you can pick the full QWERTY one which has a decent size, the alphanumeric keypad or the handwriting recognition.

On the right side of the Sony Ericsson Satio sit the media gallery shortcut, the camera mode key, a capture button and the volume rocker which doubles as a zoom once you fire up the camera. On the left spine you will have access to the power/USB/headset connector, a lock switch and the microSD card slot.

This smartphone is running on Symbian 9.4 and comes bundled with the QuickOffice Suite but you can’t modify the files, along with other tools like a PDF reader, calendar, a Facebook application, a unit converter, an alarm clock and a handy calculator. More advanced features include 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi and the Walkman player which is not quite flashy but it does the job very nice.

The highlight of the Satio would have to be its excellent 12.1 megapixel camera that comes with both a xenon flash and an LED one. It is an autofocus camera that has a 16x digital zoom and offers five different shooting modes, including BestPic and panorama, as well as face and smile detection, exposure settings, red-eye reduction and image stabilization, among others. This camera is able to record VGA videos at 30 FPS. The quality of the shots is great but it generally depends on the lighting conditions. The flash is a bit too powerful but if you turn it off, the images will come out somewhat hazy.

The 1,000 mAh battery has a rated talk time of 11 hours and a standby time of 15 days.

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