The previous year was a great one for mobile phones, as new models and discoveries gave the mobile landscape a very interesting look over the months. New smartphones made their debuts, with increasingly versatile and efficient feature sets meshing well with faster operating systems and powerful integrated hardware. Indeed, companies seemed determined to prove to themselves and their user bases that the mobile phone has indeed come a long way since the day of bulky early models that could only make and receive voice calls. Between the battle for smartphone supremacy and sheer multitude of customizable applications available to users, mobile phones were the focus of a lot of attention in 2009.
One unit that deserves a good deal of attention is Sony Ericsson’s Satio, which established itself as a solid release despite certain tradeoffs that kept it from being the best all-around phone. While limited by its short battery life and difficulty maintaining strong signal reception, the Satio nevertheless functions well as a multimedia smartphone with great multimedia playback quality and diverse connectivity options, as well as a top-of-the-line 12 megapixel camera and responsive, colorful touchscreen. Priced fairly competitively, the Satio continues to be one of the stronger releases debuted in the past year and still holds its own with the best of them when it comes to multimedia features and camera quality.
The Satio was Sony Ericsson’s first touchscreen phone for 2009, and it had a lot of work cut out for it in terms of making up for 2008’s lackluster Sony Ericsson Xperia. However, the screen on the Satio is both extremely responsive for a resistive touchscreen, and the touch reading is precise enough to allow users to not make very many accidental presses. The screen is also very sharp and colorful and fills out the 3.5-inch display nicely, and the quality is certainly comparable to most phones with screens its size. This works extremely well in favor of the phone when taken hand in hand with the exceptional 12-megapixel camera, strengthened by autofocus and promising great picture quality for daytime to afternoon shots.
Beyond the lack of a standard 3.5mm headphone socket, the Satio is an effective multimedia phone. User-friendly media menus are easily read and navigated, similar to the Sony Ericsson Walkman style, with dedicated media keys available for easy access to your music and video. The video [WMV, MP4, 3GP and Real Video] playback on the 360×640 display is excellent, and the sound is more than satisfactory as well. Supporting these strengths is a similarly solid web browser, which despite slow load times for most webpages is worth the wait with clear page rendering and smooth finger-operated navigaton. The Satio also comes with dedicated Youtube and Facebook apps [in the My Apps folder] that help optimize the web experience for those two commonly-browsed sites.
However, the phone’s battery life stands as rather short, which is typical for large-display touchscreens but nevertheless a bit of a downer – the Satio’s battery lasts about a day with average use, which limits the enjoyment you can continuously get out of its excellent features. Similarly problematic is its signal reception, which hampers call and message functionality somewhat. Still, this is more or less par for the course for phones of this sort, and the Satio does deliver quite well in every other aspect of its use.
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