Still remember Sony Ericsson Iduo that first appeared at MWC 2009? If you can’t remember that than you might have heard about the Sony Ericsson 12MP cameraphone that has been rumored around on the internet. Yes, the phone is now on the market, but marked as a new name as Sony Ericsson Satio. Despite being the first 12MP camera phone, the Sony Ericsson Satio was also awaited by many people because it is also a touchscreen smartphone that Sony Ericsson rarely produce. However it is worth to wait? Let’s check it out.
Design
For a fully touchscreen device that measures at 112 x 55 x 13 mm and 126 g, the Sony Ericsson Satio is obviously not a slim or small handset. However, the robust and solid built make it feel compact and won’t have causing too much of a bulge in a pocket. The front was dominated by a 3.5-inch resistive, touch sensitive screen with a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. Although it is not AMOLED technology, but the display quality pretty good in brightness and contrast as well as the sunlight legibility. There are only three buttons on the front side – send, end and menu that located under the screen. There’s a screen lock and microSD slot, plus proprietary headphone jack/AV output to one side and camera shutter, camera/video switch, play button and zoom/volume buttons to the other side. Overall, the design of Sony Ericsson Satio is pretty stylish, though we prefer metal casing rather than this plastic one.
User Interface
Sony Ericsson Satio runs the Symbian OS 5th edition and it is the first time the company applying this OS in their phone. The different of this UI in this device is the homescreen was divided into five tabs at the upper part of the screen that to access to favorite contacts, bookmarks, home, photos, shortcuts. Each tab have it own application under it. Like at Home tab you will see the wallpaper, operator name, time and date and music controls; bookmarks tag store your own favorite internet pages; shortcut tab is where you place up to 8 shortcuts to applications and functions of your own choosing. Well, this is where we see the company tweak Sysbiam OS, rest of it is still remains S60 5th edition.
Camera
As we know the Sony Ericsson Satio has a 12MP camera and that is the biggest point to woo people. It has maximum image resolution of 4000 x 3000 pixels and come with both xenon and LED flash. The camera come with the feature almost like a digital cam. Whatever you seen on other camera phone, you will found out at here such as geo-tagging, face and smile detection, white balance, effects, image stabilizer, self-timer, Flash settings, Exposure compensation and able to capture VGA video at 30fps too. Also the Satio’s default camera setting captures wide-format, 16:9, 9-megapixel images that fit to many latest LCD display and TV. And the quality of the camera? It’s brilliant! Way much better than 8MP camera, even some real digicam. And the speed of the camera is also very fast, no big lag problem to shoot a picture. We are really impressed by the camera.
Music and Video
The Satio still applying the Walkman music player with some improvements have been made. It is convenient to use, but strangely settings like equalizer or sound effects are missing. But the biggest letdown is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone socket. The audio quality through the speaker is only acceptable level, not up to standard of a high end phone like this. Watching video in the other hands is very enjoyable on this phone. Thanks for the high resolution screen and excellent image quality, on top of that the 16:9 aspect ratio make it really nice to watching movie on the device. However, the video player also has one let down, the lack of DivX and XviD support. You will either need to buy a new application for video playback or have to convert the video file to it support type like WMV/RV/MP4/3GP format in order to watch it on the phone.
Final Words
There is no doubt the 12.1MP camera make Sony Ericsson Satio be a brilliant smartphone. The closest rival of Satio would be the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 that also carry 12MP camera. Frankly, it is hard to compare both of these phone. By consider of the features, Satio is better because it is a smartphone. But for multimedia capabilities, Pixon12 is better. If you can’t make a decision right now, why don’t wait for other manufacturers to produce other 12MP cameraphone? As we know, LG already has one in their lineup and will be released very soon.
Loading ...
