Five reasons to choose the Sony Ericsson Satio

1. It’s the most excellent camera phone on the market by far. 12.1 megapixels, autofocus, face detection, image stabilization and tonnes more makes the quality of its pictures superior than many dedicated digital cameras.
2. Great list of features, including GPS, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, and video recording/streaming
3. Amazing 3.5″ touchscreen with 16 million colours
4. Excelent Web browsing experience, plus built-in Facebook and YouTube applications.
5. Google maps with turn by turn navigation included.

Overview of the Sony Ericsson Satio

The Sony Ericsson Satio is a fantastic combination of camera and phone. On the front, it’s completely a touchscreen phone, while on the back, it’s completely a camera. Inside, it’s both, completely mixed with the right combination of outstanding picture taking features and mobile phone options.I’ll talk about the picture-taking abilities of the Satio in a minute. For the moment, just believe that you can’t find a superior camera phone on the market today, so if it’s a superiority camera phone you want, stop reading now and go purchase the Satio!

Before that, though, I’ll talk first about the Satio’s other features; satio mobile phone features, connectivity options, Web browsing, GPS, media player, 3D games, video streaming , and pretty much every other option that Sony Ericsson could throw at this beast!

The Satio’s screen

The Satio provide with a 3.5″ touschreen with a 16:9 widescreen display. Capable of displaying over 16 million colours at a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, the screen is wonderful, which is pretty much what you’d hope for with a phone designed to take great pictures.

The only weakness of the Satio’s screen is that the touchscreen is based on resistive technology rather than capacitive, like the iPhone and Android. This means that you require a fingernail or stylus (supplied) to use the touchscreen effectively. You can’t just slide your finger on the screen and expect things to work like on the iPhone.

The body of the Satio

The Satio comes in a candybar form factor with no keypad. The only physcial buttons are the call accept, cancel and a menu button. Every other feature is accessed via the touchscreen. From the front, the Satio looks like any other touchscreen phone. But from the back, however, is a different story, as it’s here that the Satio’s real power in fact lies – it’s huge 12.1 megapixel camera!

There’s a wonderful and enormous slide out lens-cover on the Satio which adds to the sense of quality. Above it is the xenon flash – the top in the business, no less!

The Satio dimension is 112mm x 55mm x 13.3 mm, and weighing in at 126 grams, it’s not closely a slimline gadget! However, you can’t expect a flagship phone to be super-slim, and it’s certainly no bigger than its main competitors (Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, for example).

The Satio’s main features

Inside, Sony Ericsson have provided the Satio with a giant array of features. As well as the camera-specific features, which we’ll come to in a minute, the Satio as well contains the following:
* 12.1 megapixel camera with auto-focus, xenon flash and geo-tagging
* A-GPS
* Google Maps
* Turn by turn navigation
* Media player
* Web-kit Web browser (the same one used on Nokia smartphones, Android phones and the iPhone)
* Virtual QWERTY keyboard
* Landscape and portrait mode with automatic switching between the two according to the phone’s orientation
* HD and 3D games
* Facebook application
* Video streaming and viewing
* YouTube
* Wi-Fi
* HSDPA
* Quad-band GSM
* TV-Out and USB

This is pretty well everything we’d expect from a feature phone these days, and is another of the best qualities of the Satio – it has a best camera and it doesn’t compromise on features. Better still, because it’s Sony Ericsson, all the features work just as they should, with best quality results across the board.

There is, however, one exclusions – the Satio has a proprietary headphone jack, rather than a standard 3.5mm jack used by virtually every other manufacturer on the marketplace.

The Sony Ericsson Satio’s camera

Sony Ericsson have done all they could to make the Satio the top camera on the market. To do this, they’ve added the following features:

* 12.1 megapixel camera
* Xenon flash (the best type for camera phones)
* Dual LED flash (for recording video)
* Up to 12x digital zoom
* Auto focus
* BestPic
* Face detection
* Geo tagging of photos
* Image stabilizer
* Photo feeds
* Photo fix
* Send to web
* Red-eye reduction
* Smile detection
* Touch focus
* Video recording

That doesn’t tell the whole story though. What you find with the Satio is an experience much closer to that of a digital camera than you’d expect with a mobile phone.

Take, for example, focusing. Not only does the Satio come with auto-focus (which you’d expect), it also has face detection, which locks onto a face and focuses automatically on it without you having to do anything. Switch on smile detection, and the Satio won’t take a picture until it detects a smile.

There’s an image stabilizer which decrease vibration, automatic geo tagging of your pictures, red eye reduction and touch focus, which is my special favourite. This lets you adjust the focus of the camera by touch. You simply line up your shot so the the picture is shown on the screen, then touch the screen where you want the camera to focus. It makes taking best quality pictures a snap, and shows just how good touchscreens work with cameras.

Summary

In conclusion, the Sony Ericsson Satio sees Sony Ericsson going back to its roots and producing a camera phone of excellent performance. The company has been suffering lately with bad results and bad phones, but the Satio sees it back to best form again. My only consideration is the user interface, which is seeming rather old now, and my only displeasure is the lack of 3.5mm headphone jack.

Those gripes aside, the spectacular camera performance combined with the excellent list of features makes the Satio the most excellent camera phone in the world today – if you need a good camera phone, you really can’t do better than the Satio.

This entry was posted by Diet, on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. You can leave your response.