After giving you enough time to digest the Software review and walkthroughs of the Sony Ericsson Satio, I take a turn today to look at my personal opinion on the device, and specifically the things that I hate the most about it. Keep in mind, as well, that these observations are coming from a prototype unit, and there’s a chance they may be fixed in the final release.
1. Battery Life
It seems silly that after all these advances in technology, we’re still complaining about battery life. Normally, my complaints come from a power-user and always-connected perspective, but heck the Satio has one HUGE battery problem and my complaints are totally founded! Imagine a 3.5″ touchscreen device, with WiFi, GPS, HSDPA, amazing multimedia capabilities and software, astounding camera, all backed up by a tiny 950mAh battery. Seriously. Seriou-frigging-sly. Yeah, the same battery capacity as the original Nokia N95, and we all know how that went (read: it was catastrophic), oh and the N95 only had a 2.6″ screen, non-touch.
In pure numbers, if I don’t even touch the Satio, and leave only Gravity running in the background, on Edge-Only, the battery lasts 7 hours. That’s the best I could come up with. 7 sodding hours (excuse my British). Potentially, the Satio could last a full day, that is if you don’t do anything on it and you close all programs in the background. Yes, that’d be a nice silver brick (with a 12MP cam) you’d be carrying in your pocket. Just for the fun of carrying the extra weight. Or you might consider investing in a nice Proporta portable battery pack, and carry it everywhere.
2. Proprietary charging/headphone ports
One more charger to carry around, one additional set of headphones to put in your pocket, that’s what Sony Ericsson wants you to do. The problem is that, although regular SE users might be accustomed to this, the Satio has the potential to attract non-SE loyals, and they will definitely find this proprietary connector annoying. Plus, unless you have a very special plug, you can’t use the headphones and charge the Satio at the same time.
Personally, I didn’t have a lot of problems with the headphone connector, as I’ve converted to bluetooth headsets and hence don’t bother with the regular headphones anymore, but the problem with this strategy was that I was connecting over bluetooth. If you’re good at math, you would see that problem 2 + problem 1 above, means that if I want to listen to music over bluetooth, my battery life would disappear faster than candy at a child’s birthday.
Dear Sony Ericsson, oh, get over it please. No one likes your proprietary ports, no one else uses them, and the whole world is moving ahead. MicroUSB and 3.5mm headset plug next time, please. Kthxbai.
3. Lack of UI consistancies
Although I’m a big fan of the work SE has done on top of Symbian, in terms of customizing the UI for the homescreen, the multimedia section, and the camera, I still have one gripe with that, and it’s that they stopped there. Everything else is pure S60, and that means that for a first time user, who isn’t familiar with Symbian, things will look *very complicated*.
Take for example the simple Options menu. It has 3 different layouts throughout the Satio’s UI: the regular one that we’re used to with Symbian, the new one that S60 5th Edition added and that is only visible in the Satio’s web browser, and the one specific for SE which shows in the Media browser. [Example images on the top row of screengrabs below]
Another example is the how the whole UI is graphically presented. The regular Symbian part solely relies on two selection keys on the bottom, which are usually Options and Exit (or Back), sometimes with an additional set of 3 icons on top of them like in the Dial-Pad, Browser, Calendar, Contacts. The SE part, on the other hand, uses usually 5 icons on top that allow you to switch to different parts of the same application and 4 icons on the bottom that give you quick options for whatever you’re viewing. It also gets complicated where in the main view of each application, these 5 and 4 icon rows are replaced by 2 icon rows. [Example images on the bottom row of screengrabs above]
This being Sony Ericsson’s first S60 5th Edition device, it explains why there is still so much inconsistency in the UI, and it’s forgiveable to a certain extent, given how much trouble they went through to bring a refreshing UI to the device. I would love though, to see all these quirks ironed out with their next device release, or software release, with them bridging the UI gap between the regular Symbian interface and the one they developed themselves.
4. Inability to update Google Maps / YouTube
It was nice to see YouTube and Google Maps pre-installed on the Satio, until I came to realize that I couldn’t install the new versions on top of them. It would always give me an “update failed” error. This means that the Satio will always be stuck on whatever version of these two applications Sony Ericsson decides to bundle with the firmware, and you can’t bypass it. The drawback in my unit was that I couldn’t get the new layers-enabled version of Google Maps, nor the fullscreen player version of YouTube.
5. Lack of Switch application
I rely heavily on the Switch application whenever I receive a new device, to transfer my contacts, messages, calendar, notes, bookmarks and landmarks to it. The problem is that the Satio doesn’t even have a Switch application, and since I don’t back up my contacts to any other service OTA, nor do I sync them with my computer, nor do I save them to my SIM card (oh shoot me, the problem never arised before the Satio), I was bound to send my contacts as contact cards and save each one individually. I also gave up on sync’ing my other info such as calendar, bookmarks and landmarks. I know, I know, not everyone is like me, but this is the list of the things that I personally hate, and I hated that.
6. Touch screen reactivity
The term is probably wrong, but I had issues with the Satio’s reaction to consecutive keypresses. This problem was most significant while trying to use the alphanumeric keyboard, whether T9 was activated (for typing words like on/no or cab) or not. I had to resort to using the fullscreen qwerty, which is a torture. A few days later, I came back to the alphanumeric keyboard, and I noticed that the problem was far less important than before. As a matter of fact, the more I used the prototype Satio the more it *seemed* to behave better: it froze less, rebooted less, and the screen was better. By the end of the trial, I think I went 2 days without being pushed to restart it. Or maybe it was just a personal impression.
7. Lack of kinetic scrolling
Sony Ericsson did implement kinetic scrolling in all their own parts of the UI, ie the photos/video/music player, as well as the homescreen, but I wish this was extended to the browser most importantly, as well as the regular Contacts list. It would’ve made things much easier.
There are many other things that I didn’t like about the Satio, like the inability to install specific Nokia applications, like Nokia Maps or Nokia Messaging… but they aren’t really major. The list above is really what concerns me the most, especially the first 3 issues. What about you? What do you reckon is the most negative aspect of the Satio from that list? And would you be willing to look past the battery life and proprietary port problems, in order to get a handset with such great UI improvements and an amazing camera? Talking about the camera, stay tuned for tomorrow when I talk about the 7 things that I love about the Satio, and you bet that the camera is one of them, with sample images and all ;)
