Another quick fiddle, another device tried out and ready to be reported on…
The Sony Ericsson Satio is the recently-released touchscreen beast from Sony Ericsson, packing a 12.1MP camera! Wowzer, that is some serious image-processing power! I recently got my hands on one, and walked away with these impressions (bear in mind the idea here is first impressions from a few mins of playing with the device):
Build quality & form-factor – overall it’s nice, very nice. Comes across much more like a camera than a mobile device, even down to a bulge where the optics for the camera are. The device feels about the right sort of weight for it’s size, and definitely feels like quality
Screen – it’s a good size, the colours and sharpness are great, and it works well as a touch device. Checked out some wallpapers and videos, and they all looked good
UI – seems pretty reasonable overall. The use of the horizontal UI bar (XMB as they call it) works well, and breeds familiarity for Sony Blu-ray player or PS3 owners. Logical and easy to navigate
Camera – only had a very brief time to try, and obviously results were being rendered on the screen (so couldn’t check fine detail of images), but on first inspection worked well, and great quality. I wonder about how quick/easy it is to offload the massive files (well, compared to the files generated by most mobile cameras) – anyway, at least image capture is good.
Media-handling – very good – it’s a multimedia device, and needed to do well here, and it performed admirably. As noted above, videos looked good. Would have like to have captured a video to see how that came out on-screen.
Conclusion: *irony alert* – I was going to say it was a great handset, but clearly it can’t be that great, as Sony Ericsson pulled it from the shelves. I didn’t get any software problems at all whilst using the device, that being said.
Overall rating: Pretty reasonable
Grade: B (based on my short time with it)
- Build quality & form-factor – overall it’s nice, very nice. Comes across much more like a camera than a mobile device, even down to a bulge where the optics for the camera are. The device feels about the right sort of weight for it’s size, and definitely feels like quality
- Screen – it’s a good size, the colours and sharpness are great, and it works well as a touch device. Checked out some wallpapers and videos, and they all looked good
- UI – seems pretty reasonable overall. The use of the horizontal UI bar (XMB as they call it) works well, and breeds familiarity for Sony Blu-ray player or PS3 owners. Logical and easy to navigate
- Camera – only had a very brief time to try, and obviously results were being rendered on the screen (so couldn’t check fine detail of images), but on first inspection worked well, and great quality. I wonder about how quick/easy it is to offload the massive files (well, compared to the files generated by most mobile cameras) – anyway, at least image capture is good
- Media-handling – very good – it’s a multimedia device, and needed to do well here, and it performed admirably. As noted above, videos looked good. Would have like to have captured a video to see how that came out on-screen
Conclusion: *irony alert* – I was going to say it was a great handset, but clearly it can’t be that great, as Sony Ericsson pulled it from the shelves. I didn’t get any software problems at all whilst using the device, that being said.
Overall rating: Pretty reasonable
Grade: B (based on my short time with it, forgetting the reported software issues)
[Image via: Sony Ericsson]