After taking a look at the 7 things that I hate about the Satio, I change the perspective a little bit and explore Sony Ericsson’s newest Symbian device from a more positive outline. There is a lot to love about the Satio, and I would suggest you take a look at the detailed software walkthroughs and videos before reading this article, as there are a lot of specifics mentionned there that I won’t repeat again.
1. 12MP Camera, hardware wise
The 12 MP camera is the highlight of the Satio experience and Sony Ericsson didn’t spare any of their expertize building it. The resulting images are more than great and I was finally able to walk out of the house, holding only the Satio and knowing that I wasn’t compromising on picture quality by picking a “phone” as a main “camera”. Also the addition of a Xenon as well as an LED flash made taking pictures as well as close-up videos at night both a bliss. Although the Nokia N86 takes amazing pictures at night with its Dual-LED, nothing still hold a candle to having a proper Xenon and the Satio shines at showing that.
Following are some pictures taken outside, in normal Paris September daylight, ie a mix of cloudy and sunny environment. (You can click on the thumbnails to open the full size image)
Next up are some pictures taken around sunset and almost at night, outside. In the last one, which is a picture of my friend, you can see how the Xenon flash manages to take a very clear picture while the background is still very visible and evenly lit.
As I said earlier, there is no “Macro” mode to select in the Satio’s camera, instead you keep using the Autofocus mode and take pictures of close objects and the focus will adapt to it. It’s a great option since it makes switching between Macros and regular pictures a breeze as you don’t have to change the settings. Following are some Macro shots taken with the Satio, set on Autofocus mode. The first one is taken in daylight, without any flash, and the next two are taken at night with the Xenon flash blasting.
2. 12MP Camera, software-wise
I couldn’t possibly mention all that I love about the Satio’s camera in one point, especially that the software improvements brought by Sony Ericsson really stand out. Apart from the Smile Detection that is a bit gimmicky in my opinion, the Panorama mode that didn’t really work well on my prototype software, there’s a ton of features to explore and marvel about, one of which is the Touch focus capture that allows you to pick the area of the image that you want to focus on by simply touching the screen. And it works like a marvel. Following are some pictures taken with either a focus on the close object, either a focus on landscape/objects behind it. I won’t say a word and I’ll let you be the judge of how good this option works.
3. Homescreen
The first thing I really loved about the Satio was its homescreen. The way it has been divided to allow one-click access to your Contacts, Bookmarks, Music Player, Media Files, Messages, Dial-Pad, and Applications is new to Symbian, and I love the functionality it brings at the touch of a finger. It might not be a “live” homescreen à la N97 but the Satio couldn’t handle that with its minuscule battery, and I personally prefer this offline mode that Sony Ericsson went with. Everything connectivity-hungry is only a click away, but nothing runs in the background. The transition effects are also very eye-candy and add to the appeal of this Standby design. Sony Ericsson have a winner here, definitely. Here is the Homescreen’s UI walkthrough video:
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4. Music Player UI
I usually use my phone as my main music player and that’s what I did with the Satio. I was blown away with the Music Player UI which I know, now that I have an iPod Touch, really resembles Apple’s UI. Artists, Albums, Playlists and Songs are only a click away from the Now Playing screen, and there’s also an easy option to turn on Shuffle and Repeat.
5. Album Art handling
It might not be of high importance to many users, but I hate it when I look at a device’s music player screen and see an empty CD cover where the album art should appear. I own a Mac, so regular Nokia devices don’t really play nice with the way iTunes adds Album Arts, which is a shame, and I end up with the empty cover almost 99% of the time. Sony Ericsson fixed that issue in a genius non-OS specific way. Simply put the .jpg cover of the album inside the album folder when you copy it to the memory card and ka-boom, it will be recognized and displayed without you having to go and add it manually. It makes a world of difference when I unlock my handset, as I simply look at the screen and know what I’m listening to (if I’m discovering new music) or what I’m about to listen to if the music was paused.
6. RAM
With a 12MP camera pumping 2MB pictures on average and a Media browser that begs to be used, I was afraid that the Satio would lag behind in terms of RAM and that some apps would start closing randomly like on the Nokia N97. I was surprised to discover otherwise, and see that upon booting, the Satio had usually aorund 140MB of free RAM. The screenshot above shows a couple of applications running, like Gravity (a real RAM sucker), Media browser (I was in fact viewing some pictures and listening to music), as well as several utilities, with still 97.9MB of free RAM available. I was later able to run around 15 apps simultaneously, adding the Java Gmail client, Labyrinth (the game preinstalled on the Satio) and the Camera among others, without any slowdowns, and with still around 40MB of RAM to spare.
7. Google Picasa Integration
Google Picasa might not be the preferred image sharing service of many, but I have been using it for my personal photos for over a year now as it’s really intuitive and easy to share photos with my family back home. The Satio’s integration with Picasa, with the way it not only allows me to upload my images to the service, but also to download all my images from Picasa to the device, sync them, comment on them, edit their info, manage them by deleting or copying or moving, even for my private albums, was really a boon. That’s how I imagine a perfect photosharing service -- cameraphone integration done and I was amazed to see it working flawlessly on the Satio. Big ups for that. I hope that Flickr gets added to the final software as well, so many photography afficionados can experience this tight integration in action.
There you go, these are the 7 things that I really loved about the Satio. There were many other niceties, here and there, that you can read about/see in action in the Software part of the review. I will later on post my concluding thoughts about the Satio: to buy or not to buy, where it stands facing the competition, and how to look at it as a Sony Ericsson debut in S60.
