Sony Ericsson Satio (a.k.a. Idou) is perched at the top of the touchscreen food chain with an ominous grin. Currently rivaled only by the Samsung Omnia HD and in a way by the non-smart Samsung Pixon12, the 12 megapixel predator readily bares its teeth of incredible multimedia, powerful processing and of course perfect connectivity. There isn't much more to look for in a smartphone except how its potential translates to real-life performance.
Sony Ericsson Satio official photos
The Satio sure is an exciting package but at this point it still needs to live up to its very own spec sheet. This quick preview tries to give you an idea about how the Satio behaves under pressure and warn of glitches (if any) that remain hidden on paper.
Now we are pretty certain you all know them by heart but before we continue let's have a look at the main features of the Sony Ericsson Satio.
Sony Ericsson Satio at a glance:
- General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 MHz, GPRS/EDGE class 10, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 3.6 Mbps
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar
- Dimensions: 112 x 55 x 13.3 mm
- Display: 3.5" 16M-color TFT resistive touchscreen, 640 x 360 pixels
- Memory: 100MB integrated memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB), 256 MB RAM
- OS: Symbian OS
- Camera: 12 megapixel autofocus camera with xenon flash and video LED flash, geotagging, face and smile detection, Smile Shot, Smart contrast and VGA video recording at 30 fps
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, USB v2.0, GPS receiver with A-GPS
- Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, FM radio with RDS
- Battery: 1000 mAh battery
Sony Ericsson Satio at ours
Now, as we mentioned, the Sony Ericsson Satio currently has a single strong rival. The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a few megapixels short in the still camera department but makes up with stunning HD video recoding.
The Omnia HD is supposed to hit the market as early as this month and the Sony Ericsson Satio release date is still to be confirmed. The autumn sounds like a good guess for the Satio availability, but we'll just have to wait and see.
Sony Ericsson Satio views
Whatever that date may be, one thing's for sure - there's still plenty of time left until the Satio actually makes it to the shelves so new contenders are likely to emerge.
In the meantime Sony Ericsson gave the Sony Ericsson Satio its name (we preferred Idou, really) and announced that they have dropped the Symbian foundation future OS plans and will be offering the Satio with the regular touch-enabled Symbian S60 5th edition that's already used on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia N97.
Sony Ericsson have done a lot customizing of the OS giving it a distinct SE feel - and we definitely like every ounce of character they put in it. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, join us on the next page where we embark on exploring Sony Ericsson design and ergonomics.
At 112 x 55 x 13 mm the Sony Ericsson Satio fits comfortably in most pockets without causing too much of a bulge. It's about what you would expect of a 3.5" touchscreen handset and the extra girth around the camera lens is not much of a burden, given the 12 megapixel sensor. Sony Ericsson are still hesitant to publish the official weight of the Satio so our digital scales had to come into play. The handset weighs 126 grams and we are pretty certain the retail version won't differ too much. From where we stand 126 grams is just about acceptable. The Sony Ericsson Satio body is all made of plastic which - as you probably know if you've been keeping track - we are not too thrilled with. However the plastic used on the Satio is obviously of very high quality and we've no reason to question the handset's looks and reliability. By the way, we can hardly imagine what a load the Satio would have been if it was made of steel or some other metal. The front of the Satio is anything but groundbreaking design-wise in its segment, the 3.5" touchscreen taking most of it. Underneath there are three controls, a video-call camera, ambient light sensor and the earpiece on top. The hardware keys are perhaps too narrow but still pretty usable, and blend well with the overall design. The keys in question are the menu button squeezed in-between the call and end keys, just as on the S60 5th edition devices. The 3.5" 16M-color resistive touchscreen is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the device. It has stunning picture quality with incredible brightness and excellent contrast for a TFT unit. Images look impressively vibrant on it. Resistive displays need some pressure to be applied to get a click registered. As we find out, the amount of pressure required is just fine - you don't need to squeeze like on some touchscreens. It is by no means as sensitive as capacitive displays but then again, the Satio can be controlled with a stylus or with gloves on. The left side of the Sony Ericsson Satio features the screen lock slider, the proprietary all-in-one connectivity port and the microSD card slot. We were certainly hoping for a 3.5mm standard jack and a microUSB for data and charging but to no avail. At least the memory card slot is covered by a plastic lid so it won't fill up with dust and dirt. Plus, the Satio is yet another recent Sony Ericsson handset to move away from the Memory Stick Micro M2 storage. We really like the way Sony Ericsson are going recently. The right side hosts an array of camera controls. Starting from the bottom those include the shutter key, the camera mode toggle key, the gallery key and the odd one out - the volume rocker. In all fairness the volume rocker doubles as a zoom lever so it isn't totally irrelevant to imaging. The power key of the Sony Ericsson Satio is located at the top, right next to the loudspeaker. All there is at the bottom is the lanyard eyelet. The backside of the Sony Ericsson Satio is where it gets really interesting. Not that the stylish lens cover we know from the C905 impressed us that much - it's what's hiding underneath. The 12 megapixel camera lens is accompanied by both a xenon and a LED flash, so the Satio is perfectly covered in low-light for both still camera and camcorder mode. There are also a couple of tiny apertures around the camera lens, which we guess are some kind of light sensors. As we managed to confirm, the camera performance of the Satio is nothing short of impressive and the handset can fully replace a mid-range point-and-shoot digicam. Definitely worth this spoiler, even if it is to be discussed in detail a little later in the review. Removing the battery cover reveals the 1000 mAh Li-Po BST-33 battery. The battery is able to power up the handset for almost two days with Bluetooth constantly turned on and email syncing at regular intervals. The general build quality of the Satio is quite good and the materials used are both nice looking and durable. The handset feels perfectly in hand and, contrary to what you may've guessed, the thicker upper half of the handset doesn't upset balance and comfortable grip. So that's about it on the hardware now let's take a peek inside. As we mentioned, Sony Ericsson dropped their plans of using the Symbian Foundation upcoming mobile OS on their Satio in favor of the already available Symbian S60 5th edition touch UI. That's a move probably motivated by the timeframe constraints - getting Satio on the market is a top priority for Sony Ericsson. If you are into big and expensive smartphones, chances are you already know quite much about the Symbian S60 5th edition. Chances are you may have even seen it in action on the highly popular Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. We are glad to see that Sony Ericsson have customized the interface to match their current product lineup experience more closely. We are quite fond of the new tabbed homescreen that Satio is pioneering - we haven't seen that on the 5800 XpressMusic or the Omnia HD. The tabs of the homescreen match different parts of the UI, including favorite apps, gallery, favorite contacts, network services etc. Number 1 Starting from left to right the first tab contains your favorite contacts, which are added by pressing the plus key at the bottom. Number 2 Next comes the Bookmarks tab. There are several bookmarks conveniently preinstalled but you can change those as you like. Unfortunately, that tab is non-scrollable, meaning you can fit only 8 bookmarks here. Number 3 The third tab is on by default and it resembles a regular S60 homescreen. It has a Walkman button, four other shortcuts at the bottom and the current date and time displayed. If you have a track running in background the icon for the music player is replaced by the name of the song along with album art and three music player controls (pause, next and previous). The shortcuts in the bar at the bottom are to the dial pad, the media center, the messaging and the My phone search application. Number 4 The Gallery tab is certainly one of the best looking parts of the interface, allowing you to browse pictures by simply sweeping your finger across the screen (up or down) and the pics are sorted by date. It also enables viewing a photo of your choice in the media center, setting it as wallpaper or sending it away by a single click. Unfortunately at this stage there are no other options except the mentioned ones and you can't zoom or get a small thumbed list as in the main gallery. Number 5 The final tab contains shortcuts to a number of programs of your choice. Much like with the Bookmarks tab - there are only 8 slots for application shortcuts here - scrolling is not an option. Of course if you happen to prefer some of the other homescreen layouts, available to the S60 devices they are here too. However none of them can rival the looks or the functionality of the Sony Ericsson's custom plug-in. We have prepared a short video for you demonstrating the Sony Ericsson Satio user interface. Just remember to click the HD button once you start watching The Sony Ericsson Satio Media center is a replica of what you usually find on the company's feature phones - an attractive and convenient way of accessing the media content on your phone. Sony Ericsson decided to minimize the Media shortcuts (at least at this stage) and there are only three of the usual suspects, which build the main media center menu - Photo, Music and Video. As you may already guessed the first one will lead you to the main gallery with various options available, the second give access to all playlist and the Walkman and finally the third one will show you all video clips stored in the Satio. Image gallery The photo gallery is definitely among the best we've seen with great customization capabilities and features. Some of those options include: one-click access to the latest snapshot you've taken, timeline view for your images and tags. Tags are a very helpful feature offering better ways to make albums - one photo can belong to more than one tag, which you can't do with folders. Viewing photos is a joy with the Satio, especially when browsing images fullscreen. When you want to go to the next in line, it doesn't simply pop up but instead slides in from left or right. Selecting a photo zooms it in to fill the screen. Tapping on the screen reveals the full list of available options - delete, edit, use as, assign to contact, slideshow, print tag, rotate, information, etc. There is also a Pictures section, which stores all the preloaded images that were not taken with the phone's camera. Walkman player The Sony Ericsson Satio comes with the Walkman music player with all its extras and eye-candy. Much like the rest of the media menu, the accelerometer is used here for automatic rotation of the display. Naturally the music player also offers step-by-step filtering of the tracks you want to hear. The "Now playing" screen is simple but offers all the needed controls and information. The tracks are controlled by comfortably large and thumbable on-screen keys at the bottom. Above them is the current track info such as album art, running time, track name, performer and album. Strangely enough the Satio offered neither equalizers nor alternative visualizations. Those are however quite likely to appear in the final version of the handset. Video player The video player on the Sony Ericsson Satio has pretty limited functionality compared to the one found on the company's features phones. It has neither slow-mo playback nor screenshot capabilities. Our real grudge with the video player however is that there's no DivX and XviD support - what can we say, LG and Samsung handsets have definitely spoiled us. Missing support for the extremely popular codecs means that all the videos need to be converted for watching on the excellent widescreen display. We suppose MediaGo will fill in that purpose with all the imposed limitations of course. When it comes to the watching experience itself, the Satio is nothing short of flawless. High resolution, excellent image quality and 16:9 aspect ratio make for a really nice video combo indeed. The Sony Ericsson Satio packs the first 12 megapixel camera we have seen on a mobile phone. With maximum image resolution of 4000 x 3000 pixels, both xenon and LED flash, it truly is exciting news for cameraphone imaging. However everyone with a basic idea of photography will tell you that image quality is not all about the pixel count. It will be the general performance (things like amount of resolved detail, noise levels, color reproduction, and lens quality) that will be decisive for the Satio's imaging success or failure. The Satio camera interface is decently comfortable with the viewfinder occupying only the central part of the screen when regular 4:3 aspect ratio photo resolution 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 Auto mode is selected all the other icons disappear leaving only the bottom one for switching it back off. The handset then takes care to select the most proper scene mode for each of your photos and apply the proper settings. Opening the settings menu gives you a real load of customizable options. Those include focus mode, white balance, effects, image stabilizer and self-timer. You can also choose whether a preview of every shot captured should appear 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. A heavily camera-oriented high-end handset, 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 any particular subject in the frame by simply clicking on it in the viewfinder. The Satio will automatically focus on it and take a shot. The easiest way to see how far Sony Ericsson have gone with the Satio image quality is to compare it to one of the best examples currently on the market - the Samsung i8510 INNOV8. The 8 megapixel slider easily produced some of the highest quality photos in our 8 megapixel shootouts upsofar so it should be quite a good reference. As we found out, the Satio manages to outperform the INNOV8, albeit by not such a wide margin. Satio managed to resolve more detail with pretty much similar noise levels while in all other aspects the two handsets were virtually on par. Considering the pre-release version of the Satio, this is quite an achievement. In practice, the extra 4 megapixels do make a difference even if not a 50% improvement as some might guess. However, with the Satio still in development, it'll hardly be a surprise if it opens a wider gap on chasers when it actually gets released. Here is how the Sony Ericsson Satio compares to the Samsung i8510 INNOV8. And here goes a 100% crop from two of the photos above illustrating the resolution advantage that the Satio has over the INNOV8. And there go some more 12 megapixel samples from the Satio camera. Sony Ericsson Satio will come with VGA videos, equaling XPERIA X1's achievement. While our early pre-release sample cannot quite handle the 30 fps framerate it gets pretty close and we're confident that this will be sorted out before the handset hits shelves. The quality of the videos is really great with almost unmatched amount of resolved detail, very good contrast and precise colors. While the HD capabilities of the Samsung Omnia HD still remain unsurpassed, the Satio is definitely among the top contenders for the world title in the VGA category (once they sort out the nagging framerate issue). The Wi-Fi connections are managed through the dedicated menu in the Connectivity bar in Settings. It's very easy to use - you may choose a Wi-Fi connection and start browsing immediately or just connect to it and then use any application you want. Another wireless management can be done with the old Symbian shortcut homescreen, which is also found on Nokia devices or Samsung INNOV8. The only GPS software which is bundled in the Satio is Google Maps. The app works pretty much the same as it did when we tested it on the 5800 XpressMusic, offering fullscreen view with two small zoom buttons in the down left corner. Zooming and moving throughout the map is very easy and the resistive screen does not ruin the nice experience at all. The web browser is a really cool part of the Sony Ericsson Satio. An improved version of what we found on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the browser has excellent page rendering and pretty good speed, plus decently user-friendly UI. We were also very satisfied to find out that the Sony Ericsson Satio web browser comes with full Flash and Flash video support. This means that you will no longer need the mobile version (if they have one to begin with) of sites like YouTube and can use the full one instead with the Satio. There is only one game present in the Satio entertainment chapter and it's the Labyrinth. It is almost the same as the Teeter on the HTC's smartphones. By tilting the phone, you guide a ball to an end point avoiding holes along the way. There are some new obstacles on the way but the essence is the same. Unfortunately the ball speed is much slower than Teeter and doesn't feel that natural. We really hope they will optimize that with the retail version. Our brief experience with Sony Ericsson Satio left us happy and waiting for more - we really hope to get a second glimpse of it in a more detailed review once it hits the market. Our first impressions are downright positive and competitors will have to go to extra lengths for a shot at beating it. However, there are at least 4 months to go before the Satio is actually retail ready. In a dynamic market that may just be too long - the competition has plenty of time to react accordingly. Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is already set for market launch and Samsung Pixon12 won't be too late either. At this stage Sony Ericsson Satio is not a finished product and getting all the little buggy bits straight will make all the difference between success and failure. Timing the launch right is equally important and we hope Sony Ericsson don't let us down on that one either. The Satio horizon is wide open but Sony Ericsson must know that this handset's success might be just the right thing to turn the tide for the troubled company.Sony Ericsson Satio 360-degree spin
Design and construction
The handset looks pretty neat
Hardware keys under the display • video-call camera and ambient light sensor next to the earpiece
The screen lock slider and connectivity port are on the left
The right side is mostly about the camera
The power key and the loudspeaker are on top
The lanyard eyelet
The 12 MP camera lens and its entourage
A 1000 mAh battery lies under the hood
The Sony Ericsson Satio in handSymbian OS touch-style
Symbian S60 5th edition
The tabbed homescreen
Favorite contacts tab • settings • viewing a contact • contacts list
Bookmarks tab
The default homescreen
The gallery on the fourth tab
The shortcut tabMedia center
The media center in portrait and landscape modes
The image gallery • landscape mode
Music menu • Walkman music player • the homescreen controls
The video player needs improvement12 megapixel worth of camera
Camera interface • camcorder interface
Sony Ericsson Satio • Samsung i8510 INNOV8
Sony Ericsson Satio • Samsung i8510 INNOV8
Sony Ericsson Satio camera samplesVGA videos of splendid quality
Wi-Fi and GPS connectivity
The homescreen connectivity button • connectivity menu
Location services • Google mapsWeb browser has full Flash support
The web browserEnter the Labyrinth
The LabyrinthFinal words
Samsung Omnia HD • Samsung Pixon12
