Sony Ericsson Satio Review – Software & Interface Video Walkthroughs

I exposed to you yesterday the different aspects of the Sony Ericsson Satio’s design and hardware, but Sony Ericsson didn’t only innovate in the Satio in terms of hardware with a 12 MegaPixel camera, but also in terms of software which, in my opinion, is the most interesting part of this handset. Read on for a full review, along with more than 50 minutes worth of video walkthroughs.

The software underlying the Sony Ericsson Satio is S60 5th Edition, but Sony Ericsson have gone a long way to customize the interface in order to make it look different from Nokia’s offerings. The result is a refreshing departure from Nokia’s S60 UI, that shows in the Standby screen, Camera application, as well as the Media Browser. Although the Satio sports specific 3rd-party applications as well as some home-brewn Sony Ericsson replacements for many of Nokia’s specific applications, the above mentioned 3 aspects of the UI are really what stand out to a first time user and make the Satio a unique offering.

Standby / Homescreen

The multiple homescreen design on the Satio resembles in its essence the one on the Samsung Omnia HD, but still manages to bring some innovation onto the table. 5 homescreens are available, topped by a constant bar that shows the connectivity options (which when clicked open the Connectivity Settings pane), battery life, missed events, clock. The homescreens, from left to right, are:

• Contacts: quick access to your favorite contacts with the ability to call them or send them a message, as well as open their contact card.
• Bookmarks: quick access to your favorite bookmarks, which when clicked will launch the web browser on the particular page.
• Main: wallpaper homescreen showing the Date/Time (which when clicked opens the Clock application), Profile (if set to something other than General), Music Player widget (song title, artist, album art, play/pause, FF and RW functions), as well as 4 shortcuts that launch the Dial-Pad, Media Browser, Messaging and Search.
• Photos: displaying the photos taken by the Satio’s camera, with the option to set as a wallpaper, send, as well as open the image in the photo browser.
• Shortcuts: allowing you to set 8 different application or bookmark shortcuts for quick access.

You can watch this video walkthrough of the Satio’s homescreen in order to see it in action.

Apart from the novel approach to the homescreen, what I like about this particular design is that you are only a click away from almost everything on your device. It’s also well-designed with animations, kinetic scrolling, and very few lags. The only issue I encountered was on the Photos pane, which used to hang 50% of the time, but I have to keep in mind that this is prototype software and that there is still room for improvements in the final version.

Camera

With a 12 MegaPixel camera, the Satio definitely requires some heavy duty software, not only to allow for tons of options in image/video capture but also to process these images quickly and efficiently. The overall responsiveness of the Camera was good, not great, and I can only hope that the final software version improves that. As for the options, I was prepared to be dazzled by the different professional offerings and I wasn’t disappointed.

The first thing I noted was that there isn’t any Macro mode option, instead the Satio is smart enough to focus to close distances on the Automatic capture mode itself. That’s one less key to press before taking some pictures. There is a specific Document capture mode, but this one is dedicated to black writing on white background documents, so if you try to take a picture of a flower for example with it, the colours will turn out distorted and the picture will be horrible. The next impressive thing about the Camera is the presence of several picture taking modes:

• Panorama: which unfortunately isn’t intelligent like on the N86, you have to click the images yourself.
• BestPic: Sony Ericsson’s technology that allows you to take several quick consecutive images and choose the best one.
• Smile Detection.
• Touch Capture: which is one of the most amazing features, allowing you to pick which area of the photo to focus on. It’s the same as the touchscreen focus feature on the new iPhone 3GS.

As for video capture, there are several options that are regular for video recording mobile phones, but one in particular that surprised me: you can set the Satio to take videos with Sepia, Black & White, Solarize and Negative mode. This might seem gimmicky, but it’s definitely a good way to dazzle your friends with Negative videos of them ;)

Here is a full video walkthrough of the Camera UI on the Satio, which goes in detail into all the above mentioned options, as well as others that I haven’t talked about here.

What was clear to me, from the moment that I held the Satio, is that it’s a camera that has incorporated a phone, and not the other way around. Emphasizing on the Camera capabilities is quite obvious with a Xenon flash for night pictures, an LED flash for night videos, as well as the Touch Capture and Smile Detection modes and several options that you will only find in standalone digital cameras. Sony Ericsson didn’t take this aspect lightly at all, and you could say for the first time that you wouldn’t be making any compromises if you decided to get the Satio as your main digital camera.

Multimedia

The Satio’s media browser is divided in 3 sections: Photos, Videos and Music. All three have been redesigned and look nothing like the regular S60 Music Player or Gallery. The most common thing between these 3, in terms of UI, is that there’s a dead easy way to multiple select items and act on them, and that all of them work in Portrait as well as Landscape mode, although only Portrait is shown in the video walkthroughs. There’s also a tight integration with media sharing capabilities that tend to replace Nokia’s Share Online application.

The Photos browser displays images mainly organised by month or tag. It also integrates with Picasa (I would assume other services are coming) and pulls your Google Picasa image folders, private and public, with all their images, allowing you to edit their info, post comments, as well as manage them. For every image you visualize, you have a nice set of options to set is as a wallpaper, assign it to a contact, edit it, as well as send it. The send option, apart from Bluetooth, MMS and email, integrates with Sony Ericsson’s Post to Web feature, which currently supports Picasa, Flickr and Blogger natively. Here’s a video walkthrough of the photo browsing experience.

The Video browser integrates with the Google YouTube application viewer, as well as displays videos that have been copied to your memory card or taken by the Satio itself. There is no video editing capabilities that I could find, but there is a Post to Web integration that allows you to send your captured videos to Youtube or Blogger. Below is the video demonstration of the video browser.

The Music Browser/Player is in my opinion one of the best designed that I have seen on a portable music device. It lets you browse your music by Artist, Album, Playlist, Song, … but adds several major improvements:

• The main music player frame not only shows the album art and music controls, but also the song title, artist name and album title, in a very slick design.
• There are quick Shuffle and Repeat buttons that let you cycle through the different options for each one, all while your music is playing.
• Album Art is intelligently set: if you simply copy a music album with a .jpg picture inside (which is normally the album art), the Satio will recognize it as the cover for the current album and display it, no questions asked. I really love this option, and wish Symbian integrates it as built-in from now on as I’ve kind of exhausted my options to an easy way to set album art on Nokia devices and still haven’t found one that works on a Mac.
• Set as ringtone doesn’t automatically assume that you want the said song as a ringtone for your current active profile (which Nokia devices do), but instead asks you which Profile you want the ringtone for.

Also worth noting is that the Satio comes with Sony Ericsson’s TrackID application, which works like ShazamID, so you only have to put the device next to a speaker playing a song, and it will recognize its title and artist.

Personally, I was pretty excited to see a media-focused device such as the Satio, with so many UI improvements in its media consumption capabilities. Sony Ericsson definitely did an extraordinary job trying to remodel the Symbian UI, building on top of it, and it shows. The result is a UI with lots of attention to details, that is easy to navigate and figure out, and that offers most actions in under 1 or 2 clicks, all while retaining the power of customization and giving the user tons of options which we have come to know from Symbian.

Text Input

Text input on the Satio’s touchscreen is handled through the 4 regular S60 5th Edition ways: Alphanumeric keyboard, Fullscreen QWERTY, Half-QWERTY, and Handwriting Recognition. Personally, even though I much prefer the T9 keypad, I had to use the fullscreen qwerty because the screen’s reactivity to quick consecutive taps on this prototype unit was annoying. Using the fullscreen solved that problem as only one tap is required for each letter, but I was bound to hold the device with both hands, which made it really hard to use the Satio while walking. I expect the Satio’s homescreen reactivity to be improved in the final production hardware, so I’ll keep an eye on that if I get to handle a retail unit.

Messaging & Email

Messaging on the Satio is handled through the same UI as the regular S60 client, with Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Outbox… Email can be either used through the built-in POP/IMAP client, or through a pre-installed 3rd-party application: DataViz’ RoadSync. This is an Exchange client, and it should work well with Gmail accounts now that Gmail have established Push support for their mail system.

Browsing

The web browser available on the Satio is the same as the one that comes with S60 5th Edition. It has the Bookmarks section, the Options / Go to new Address / Zoom quick function keys. But it doesn’t have kinetic scrolling (at least not in this prototype software), nor does it go to fullscreen automatically when the page is loaded.

Location & Mapping

In terms of GPS capabilities, the Sony Ericsson Satio holds the regular Positioning, Favorites, and GPS Data applications from Symbian, but also adds two third-party applications: Google Maps, as well as WisePilot. I didn’t have enough time to test WisePilot, plus I don’t have a car in Paris, so I don’t know much about it, other than the fact that the main application UI is all black and white, which is annoying.

Gaming

The Satio comes bundled with two 3rd-party applications: Labyrinth by Illusion Labs and Cafe Solitaire by Digital Chocolate. Labyrinth is an accelerometer-based game that resembles Marble Maze, but the levels get really hard and the graphics are truly stunning. You can also set it to allow 3D effects and shadows on the labyrinth’s wall when you tilt the device, so it ends up being very realistic. It’s available on the Apple App Store already, but I wasn’t able to find a separate .sis installation file for it for S60, so it seems that it’s an exclusive deal for Sony Ericsson. Cafe Solitaire is present only as the regular java game.

All Software videos

Following are two videos walkthroughs of all the Satio menus, showing the Messaging & Email, Browser, GPS application, the different games, and other software installed that I didn’t mention in details here. There’s also a sneak peak at some of the RnD software that were still half-baked on my prototype unit, as well as all the log recorders and crash reporter apps that were monitoring my Satio usage (I bet they had some real tough time trying to follow me).

Settings

Apart from the Standby settings, there isn’t a lot worth mentioning in this aspect of the Satio software, as it’s regular S60 5th Edition controls. Although the Satio shows 5 different homescreen layouts, the only one I was able to test efficiently was the “Sony Ericsson” one (with the 5 different panes, explained and showcased at the beginning of this review). The other 4 kept hanging or unactivating during my test period. I assume that Sony Ericsson wanted to make sure that their own homescreen works well, then they would tackle the other ones to iron the bugs. This remains to be seen in the final production software.

Third Party Software Compatibility

All the 3rd-party software designed for S60 5th Edition that I tried installing on the Satio installed and worked perfectly. I had no problems be it with native applications, java applications, or widgets. The only applications I had trouble with are Nokia-specific applications like Share Online, Nokia Messaging, Nokia Maps, Nokia Photo Browser… as well as the Facebook widget. All of these wouldn’t install, apart from the Facebook widget which kept giving me API error.

Whew!

Well, this concludes the Sony Ericsson Satio software review, and definitely one of the longest and most exhausting posts that I have ever written. I hope you enjoyed it. Also keep your eyes peeled on Symbian-Guru as in the following days, I will tackle the things that I love (with camera samples) as well as those that I hate about the Satio, which should prove to be interesting in my opinion.

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