Review written by Michell Bak

December 24th, 2009

First announced by the concept name of Idou, the Sony Ericsson U1 (Satio) is the manufacturer’s first attempt with the Symbian S60 operating system – and what a marvelous début it is! The Satio is one of the best and most competent all-round multimedia device on the market right now, and that’s one heck of a title considering this is Sony Ericsson’s first Symbian S60-based handset.

In addition to this the Satio is Sony Ericsson’s first full touch device under the Entertainment Unlimited umbrella, featuring only a limited selection of physical hardware keys for the most essential tasks and a large 3.5-inch touch screen capable of displaying millions of colours.

Being the Entertainment Unlimited flagship device, the Satio combines the best of both worlds in multimedia. Some would call it the convergence device of the Cyber-shot and Walkman brands.

Positives and Negatives

12 MP auto focus camera with xenon flash 3.5-inch flush TFT-touch screen 8 GB micro SD card bundled Assisted GPS with Wisepilot navigation software Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP Brilliant for media content Built-in accelerometer Custom standby application with panels Environmental content and packaging Excellent web browser with Flash support Extraordinary build quality FM radio built-in Good selection of bundled accessories High quality video capturing HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) / HSUPA (3.6 Mbps) PlayNow Movies with up to 60 free movies a year Powerful hardware Quad-band GSM / GPRS / EDGE Symbian^1 (S60 5th edition) operating system TV-out functionality Wi-Fi 802.11b/g with DLNA support

A bit on the large side Alarms and notes lack settings Lacks capacitive touch screen Limited internal memory for applications and games Mediocre battery performance No 3.5 millimeter audio connector No dedicated Facebook application despite being advertised No graphical smilies in SMS messages No stereo speakers Not full version of the PDF viewer Peculiar SMS editor

I guess the lists pretty much speak for themselves, but there’s no doubt that the Satio is one of the most complete and fully featured phones on the market. Some of the negative points can be dealt with software enhancements and the remaining ones haven’t proven to be serious flaws for me.

I’d also like to mention the content of the sales package, which in itself actually looks rather dull and not worthy of a product of this class. I’m guessing this is part of Sony Ericsson’s commitment to the environment and that they’re doing their part in saving the world by using these rather minimalistic sales packages. Anyway, the sales package is not the important thing – what’s in it, on the other hand, is. Although this may differ from your experience, my retail unit came with the following:

• Sony Ericsson U1 (Satio)
• Battery (BST-33, 1000 mAh)
• Micro SD card, 8 GB
• Standard charger (CST-75)
• Headset (HPM-77)
• USB cable (DCU-65)
• Micro SD card adapter (CCR-80)
• Stylus
• Quick guides

Notice that there’s a limited selection of documentation in the package and that there’s no software CD included. This is because everything you need is on the micro SD card and you can easily plug it into your computer with the supplied adapter or USB cable. On the memory card you’ll find the Sony Ericsson PC software, including the rather brilliant PC Suite and Media Go, and you’ll also find user guides and such.

Design and Size

Design-wise the Satio is perhaps one of Sony Ericsson’s most simple and elegant phones. Its clean front consists of a large display and only three buttons at the bottom. Two of these are for calls and the third is the menu key, which also doubles as a shortcut to the taskbar when holding it for a few seconds. There’s naturally also a front facing camera for video calls, as well as a light sensor that automatically adjusts the screen backlight. And now for one of the most awesome features – it’s got a blinking status LED, too! If you’re an avid fan of Ericsson and have been in the game since the beginning of time, you’ll most probably love the status LED that blinks in different colours depending on the status of the phone, i.e. when the battery is low (blinking red), you’ve got unread messages or you’ve missed a call (blinking green). It’ll also let you know when it’s charging (solid red) and when it’s fully charged (solid green).

The Satio is a bit on the large side when it comes to physical dimensions. It measures 112 x 55 x 13.3 (16) millimetres and weighs in at a good 130 grams including the battery. Generally speaking I haven’t found the size of the phone an issue in everyday use, but it is larger than the average handset and that’s something you should definitely be aware of – please refer to the illustration below for a size comparison between the Satio and three other popular phones (from left: X2, Aino and W995). The weight is most appropriate and I wouldn’t want to see it any lower, else it would feel like a cheap toy or something like thing.

It’s available in three colour variants – black, bordeaux and silver. No fancy names for the Satio colour variants, eh! I’ve handled the black and silver variants and I think both of them are stunning. I wouldn’t be surprised if that goes for the rather bold variant in bordeaux as well.

The build quality of the phone is absolutely brilliant and, honestly, unlike anything else I’ve tried from Sony Ericsson – and I’ve had and tried a lot of Sony Ericsson phones! It feels rock solid and despite being made of plastic it’s incredibly sturdy. I haven’t experienced any creaks from heavy usage on a daily basis. I can’t even get it to creak if I try my best. Another thing that really struck me about the build quality is the fantastic feel of the sliding camera cover. I’m having difficulty finding words to describe it – ‘perfect’ just doesn’t seem to cut it. It’s spring-loaded, rock solid and not at all wobbly.

The right side of the phone sports the usual array of camera dedicated keys. You’ve got the shutter release key, mode keys and zoom keys. The latter naturally double as volume keys in the appropriate applications.

The left side of the handset holds an unusually useful key/screen lock slider, the standard Fast Port connector and a micro SD memory card slot.

On the top of the phone we’ve got the power button, which doubles as a shortcut to switching profiles, and just next to it is the phone’s mono speaker. At the bottom of the phone you’ll the keystrap eyelet.

The back of the handset very much resembles that of a digital compact camera. It’s clean and the sliding camera cover clearly makes a statement about what kind of phone this is. When you slide open the protective camera cover you’ll be facing one of the primary selling points of this phone – the camera. As you can see from the photos below, it’s equipped with a proper xenon flash and an LED flash for video recordings.

The battery can be accessed from the back as well. You can easily remove the battery cover and replace the battery, if needed. The battery is a rechargeable Lithium-Polymer BST-33 with a capacity of 1000 mAh. It’s got plenty of juice for a feature phone, but unfortunately the Satio has a higher power consumption than a feature phone, thus depleting the battery quicker. My average is about one and a half days of heavy use, which could probably be translated to about two or three days of regular use. That’s a rough estimate though.

Sony Ericsson claims it’s capable of staying up and running for 340 hours of standby or be good for almost five hours of talk connected to a 3G network (HSPA and UMTS). The figures are higher when connected to a 2G network, especially talk times, but honestly… With a multimedia phone like this it’s impossible to get even close to that kind of results.

You’ll also find the SIM card slot placed near the battery. I’m sorry to say that it’s one of the most weird installments I have seen and I somehow feel it’s a bit fragile, so careful on that one! Hopefully you won’t have to swap SIM cards frequently as I honestly don’t think it would last long if you did.

Display

The TFT touch screen on the Satio uses the resistive display technology, which is both a good and a bad thing when compared to the capacitive display technology. The good thing is that you can use a stylus or something similar on the display – this could mean that you can use the phone whilst wearing gloves. resistive screens, however, are generally not as responsive as capacitive screens and although this is also the case with the Satio, it sports the most responsive resistive display I have ever tried. I barely have to touch the surface of the display before it reacts to my touch.

The display is a rather large one. Actually the largest yet from Sony Ericsson in a mobile phone. Its diagonal measures 3.5 inches and the size makes it very pleasant for watching pictures and videos or browsing the web on the phone. In addition to that comes the 360 x 640 pixel resolution, also known as nHD, which ensures a crisp screen capable of showing great levels of detail. The screen can display up to 16.7 million different colours and is one of the first products from Sony Ericsson capable of doing that. Sure, it’s nice and all – but who’s counting? I can barely make a difference between 18 and 24 bits anyway, and I’m generally a strong believer of the concept of quality over quantity.

Enough with numbers and whatnot. The important thing is how is performs and I must say that I performs very well. Colour rendition and contrast is excellent and far beyond anything else I’ve seen for a touch screen handset. Admittedly I haven’t seen the display on the Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD) in the flesh, which is regrettable as I think it’s probably one of the only phones with a display better than the one on Satio.

It gets a bit worse when stepping outdoors, but the display is still easily readable and thus far I haven’t encountered any problems using it in direct sunlight. Quite surprisingly, actually.

As mentioned previously on, the Satio has a light sensor just above the display which automatically adjusts the display backlight to fit the surroundings. This means that the phone will dim down the backlight when you’re in a dark area to prevent you from getting blinded by the display light.

Operating system and User interface

Symbian OS 9.4

As mentioned in the intro to this review, the Satio is Sony Ericsson’s first handset to run the Symbian Foundation operating system, which in its current version is really Symbian S60 5th edition. One could say that the operating system in the Satio is a mix between Symbian^1 and Symbian^2, as it includes features from both versions of the operating system. It would have been interesting to see Sony Ericsson add kinetic scrolling in all lists and menus, which is available in Symbian^2, but I wouldn’t count on that happening. Nokia has done it with their N97 and N97 Mini though, and having spoken with a friend of mine at Symbian Foundation, I know it’s definitely not impossible to do.

Symbian is quite a solid operating system that’s been in the game for a number of years now. It is now an open source operating system run by the non-profit Symbian Foundation. There’s already a large number of applications available for earlier versions of S60, but unfortunately only some of these have been ported for Symbian^1 (S60 5th edition) and later. A quick search on Handango.com shows that there are about 1,200 applications and games compatible with Symbian^1.

Unfortunately most of these applications are rather expensive compared to the average application price in other mobile application stores, such as Apple’s App Store or the Android Market. It is not unusual for an application to cost somewhere around 10 or 20 dollars, some being cheaper and some being a lot more expensive. Naturally, some of these applications are either free or available in freeware versions as well. The lack of a global Symbian application store with cheaper titles is the primary reason why there aren’t any more software titles available. During the writing of this review, Symbian announced the Symbian Horizon application store. It should be interesting to see what this will bring along!

Sony Ericsson’s own PlayNow Arena does indeed have a few software titles for the Satio, but again it’s quite limited. I’m sure some will find a few good applications in the store, but most of them will remain overpriced.

The good thing though is that the Symbian platform has a good Java Virtual Machine and even better is the fact that Sony Ericsson has built upon it and improved it by adding more capabilities (support for more JSR’s, including JSR 239). This means that you can install Java applications and games and almost all of them will work on the Satio.

Compared to Symbian UIQ, which was used in older Sony Ericsson handsets, S60 is both faster and less resource demanding. This means that it’s actually quite a fast operating system on Satio because of its powerful hardware. Some applications, like the contacts and messaging applications, load instantly while others may take a second or two. For some that may sound like a lot, but it’s definitely not a deal breaker for me.

Hardware

Speaking of the hardware, I thought I’d just mention what’s packed underneath the clean exterior of the phone. The Satio runs the OMAP 3430 chipset. This means that the CPU is a 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8 and that the GPU is a PowerVR SGX 530, supporting OpenGL ES 2.0.

The Satio packs a total of 256 megabytes of RAM, with about 140 megabytes available for the user at boot.

Other goodies include a 430 MHz C64x+ DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and an ISP (Image Signal Processor). In other words, this baby should have enough hardware power to run even the most advanced applications.

User interface

The user interface is like a bag of mixed chocolates. S60 works just fine without a touchscreen and the user interface is definitely not bad on such a handset, but it seems like the development of Symbian^1, which is the first version of Symbian S60 to support touchscreens, was a bit rushed. The interface hasn’t really been optimized for using the finger and it’s not one of the prettiest user interfaces out there. It can be a bit confusing at times, but once you get the hang of it, it’ll be just fine.

You can naturally style the interface with themes, and it’s possible to use themes for i.e. the Nokia 5800 and N97. There are a few visual fade effects as well when entering the menu and browsing through the different folders. It all adds to the user experience, but I somehow feel it could have been a bit more comprehensive. One way of doing this could be by adding a transition effect when changing the display orientation using the accelerometer by tilting the phone. You can however choose between two different views in the main menu – grid and list arrangement. It’s also possible to reorganize applications and create folders in the main menu. Speaking of the main menu, Sony Ericsson have added their own set of icons that are much nicer than the standard Symbian ones.

Overall, the user interface is pretty straight forward and fairly easy to use. The learning curve isn’t particularly steep, so you shouldn’t be worried about getting a Satio if you’ve never had a handset based on this operating system. It’s worth pointing out that lists require two clicks to confirm, whereas you only need to press once for menu icons.

Like I said, it’s possible to enable auto rotation of the user interface and it’s actually enabled by default. However, you may want to consider disabling this feature. It’s rarely useful and the only useful thing you only lose is the option to auto rotate your pictures in the Media application. Videos will be played full screen and the music player works a lot better in portrait mode anyway. So, what do you gain from disabling it? Speed. And lots of it. I have a tendency to use the screen lock key on the Satio a lot, perhaps more than most people. I then put the phone on a plain surface or turn it upside down in my pocket. If you’ve got the accelerometer enabled, this will cause the interface to rotate – but you won’t notice it because of the screen key being enabled. However, when you unlock the phone again, you’ll have to wait a few seconds for the interface to rotate back again. This can get really annoying in the long run, especially if you’re only looking to read a message or see what time it is.

Sony Ericsson’s customizations

With that said, Sony Ericsson have made great improvements on the user interface by customizing bits and pieces and adding their own applications. The active standby application with five panels is perhaps one of the most brilliant ideas ever. Period. It works great and does an excellent job of providing quick access to various applications and settings in the phone. That way you won’t have to go through a lot of – at times – confusing menus to reach an application or setting.

The homescreen is made of five tabs or panels – favourite contacts, bookmarks, home, photos from Media, and shortcuts.You can toggle between the panels by pressing the tabs or just swiping your finger across the 3.5-inch touch screen.

The Home panel is the typical screen that you’ll see on almost all phones. It displays operator information, the clock and date and of course a wallpaper. Sony Ericsson have also added a music player widget at the lower part of the screen as well as four shortcuts to the dialer, Media, messaging and search functionality at the bottom of the screen. The latter is a combined local and web search and can be found as separate application as well. They work very well.

The Favourite contacts panel is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s basically a user-defined list of favourite contacts displayed with a picture for each contact. You can easily add and remove contacts and the list makes use of kinetic scrolling. Pressing a contact will display three options: Call, Message and View in Contacts.

The Bookmarks panel is much like the favourite contacts one. You can simply add and remove bookmarks and kinetic scrolling is also present.

The Photos panel displays all your camera snapshots from Media in a long row of large thumbnails ordered by date. You navigate the list by swiping your finger across, and you can set the selected image as a new background image, send it or open it in Media, where you’ll have more options.

The fifth panel, being the Shortcut panel, is a user-defined list of up to eight shortcuts, whether it be applications or settings. My list is set up to include easy access to Bluetooth, notes and the radio.

The Media application is also a brilliant addition that has actually completely replaced the default S60 media players. More about this in the “Entertainment and Music” section.

Applications and PIM

Organizer

The calendar application is pretty standard and can be accessed from the main menu. You can toggle between four views: Day, Week, Month and Tasks. It’s easy to create new meetings, notes, anniversary appointments and tasks and you can also add a description to these either by writing a new description or importing a note from the Notes application.

Speaking of notes, it’s easy to add and edit them, but there’s no option to display a note on the desktop. This is a feature I use a lot on my OSE-based handsets, and I’m really going to miss it on Satio. There’s also a sound recorder capable of recording high quality sound clips.

You can naturally set alarms on this phone, but I’m a bit let down with the few options you have available. Sure, you can set it to repeat based on your needs, but you cannot add an image to the alarm. I’d suggest you get a third-party application for handling alarms if this is a feature you use a lot. A few positive things to mention though is the fact that the number of alarms isn’t limited and that you can snooze the alarm by turning over the phone – you simply need to enable that option in the sensor settings first though.

The calculator is fairly simple. It offers the most basic features and it’s pretty easy to use, although a tad slow. We wonder why you have to enter the settings menu to use the memory feature. There should have been a few buttons for this.

There’s also a converter application capable of converting currencies, areas, energy, lengths, mass, effect, pressure, temperatures, time, speed and space. It’s quite comprehensive and does a good job – but what’s up with the boring look and feel?!

The built-in file manager is extensive and offers a good selection of options. You can delete, organise, rename, find, sort and view details of files and folders. You can also format and rename the memory card or even password protect it if you want. The only thing I miss is a shortcut button for marking several items at a time. It takes ages double tapping on each item, then select to mark it and then continue to the next.

Synchronization

The Satio supports many kinds of synchronization, and one of them is Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. The phone comes preloaded with DataViz’ RoadSync application to allow push synchronization of e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and attachments. I’m not personally a user of Exchange, so I haven’t had a chance to test RoadSync, but it’s a very popular enterprise tool and it’s used by thousands of customers globally.

It’s also capable of synchronizing with third-party services, such as the Sony Ericsson Contacts service. I’ve got my Satio set up to do backups of my contacts to a cloud server, so they’ll always be protected.

A third option is the PC Suite software that comes with the phone. It’s a brilliant tool which I’m quite fond of. Bluetooth is enabled on my Satio most of the time and same goes for Bluetooth on my PC. This means that the PC Suite application will automatically connect to the phone once the phone is within Bluetooth working range. You can even set it up to automatically synchronize the phone every time you connect and in intervals after that. You can also connect by USB cable or infrared data communication although the latter isn’t supported by the Satio. Like I said, it’s a brilliant tool.

Other features of the PC Suite include backup functionality of contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, bookmarks and files. The application also automatically fetches all MMS and SMS messages on the phone, so you can manage it on the computer. You can also compose both MMS and SMS messages directly from the PC. Contacts, calendar and files can also be managed from your computer. It’s really nice. I keep it running in the background at all time.

Applications

PDF documents can be viewed with Adobe PDF, but to my great surprise it’s only a 15-day trial version! This has got to be one of the most ackward decisions from Sony Ericsson yet. You’re required to purchase a full license if you want to continue being able to use the application.

Office documents (Excel, PowerPoint and Word) can be opened with QuickOffice, which comes preloaded on the device. It’s only version 4, which means you can’t view files in the new 2007 format, so I’d recommend you purchase the upgrade to QuickOffice 6, which will also add editing capabilities not found in the preloaded version.

MyLook is a curious little application. You basically set up a number of background images and leave it running in the background. It’s then possible to set the application to change the background image based on time, shake (using the accelerometer) or location from cell ID. The latter is quite cool, meaning you can have one background image at work and another at home.

SMS Preview is a simple application that will display a preview of new incoming messages. This way you can read the message and see the sender without having to open the messaging application. A note of caution though as it has to be activated by sending an international SMS. Other than that, it’s free to use.

WorldMate is a very useful application for those travelling a lot. It can display user-defined world clocks, flight schedules, alerts and status, a day/night map, satellite imagery, weather information and it includes a currency converter. Unfortunately it’s not the full version, and you’ll need a WorldMate Gold subscription for some of the services. The application comes with a 7-day trial of the Gold services and you get a 20 percent discount if you choose to purchase a subscription.

Positioning services

Google Maps is naturally preloaded on the device, and it can be quite useful for finding points of interest, i.e. a restaurant or a place to stay for the night. It supports various view modes, but unfortunately cannot be used for turn-by-turn voice navigation.

That’s where Wisepilot comes in the picture though, as this is the dedicated GPS application used for navigation. Wisepilot downloads map material over the air, and can use both your 3G and WiFi connection. Fortunately it’s not that heavy on data usage. You’ll have to send an international text message before being able to use the application though.

I must admit that I quite fancy Wisepilot as a navigation solution. Its user interface is easy to use and the amount of features will be sufficient for most users. There’s lot of settings to fiddle around with too – great news for us tech geeks!

Satio’s built-in GPS is excellent. It picked up my location very quickly and was ready to use within seconds. That’s how it’s supposed to be! It gets a bit harder to get a fixed signal when you’re indoors, but it has been possible for me thus far.

Entertainment and Music

Music

The built-in music player is capable of sorting your songs by artist and album just like any other decent music player on the market. You can also create playlists, or add podcasts and audio books to your music library.

It’s easy to navigate between the various lists and the user interface is generally very responsive and user-friendly. It should take no more than a few minutes to get familiar with everything.

The player itself is rather cool looking. At the top of the display, song information (title, artist and album) is shown alongside the current shuffle and repeat settings. Just below, you’ll see a large size album cover with a reflection. It looks quite neat. Then we’ve got the usual player controls and more setting buttons at the very bottom of the display. Pressing the left “more” button will display an additional six options, including delete, send, add (to playlist) and detailed file information about the song.

There’s also a shortcut button for minimizing the player to the active desktop. When doing this, you’ll have a mini player at the lower part of the screen with a small album cover, controls and song title. If a song is playing whilst in mini-mode, the wallpaper will be replaced with animated particles. This can also be turned off.

The music player lacks equalizers, but honestly… I don’t miss them. The audio quality is more than good enough for me. I would like the maximum volume level to be a bit higher though.

The radio works with every headset you can attach to the phone. The radio application is a tad too simple for my taste though. It supports automatic saving of up to 30 different radio channels, and you can play the audio via the speaker. You can also minimize the application. Other than that, it’s quite limited. There’s no RDS support and you can’t use TrackID with the radio either. I can’t help but think that the radio application was a “last-minute” solution. It just feels incomplete. Anyway, the radio is there and I suppose it does what it’s supposed to do.

TrackID is present on the Satio, but as previously noted it cannot be used with the radio. Therefore you can only use it to recognize songs playing around you. There’s not a whole lot to be said about TrackID. It’s a simple music recognition service that uses Gracenote’s huge music database. Its results are spot-on most of the time! If you like the song playing and TrackID successfully recognized it, you’ll have the option to buy the song – either from your mobile operator or from Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow Arena.

Pictures

The picture viewer is rather simple. You can browse through pictures from your camera album or just all photos on the phone. It’s also possible to browse your photos by tags or on an online web album from services like Picasa. You’ll be able to view comments on pictures and such, if you’re using an online web album.

The camera album is sorted by month. Choosing a month will let you view pictures taken in that month in a 3 x 6 thumbnail view. You navigate using your finger and kinetic scrolling.

Once you have selected a photo, you can view it full screen by rotating the phone to landscape mode. You’ve got options to delete or send the photo. If you want to do more than that, there’s also a shortcut “more” button that’ll let you view detailed file information about the photo, zoom, print, edit, add it to a contact, make it your background picture, add tags or start a slide show.

Videos

Videos work just as you expect them to. In the overview, you can choose to browse videos, camera videos or podcasts. It’s also possible to view videos from YouTube using the built-in YouTube application. It’s actually quite good and gets the job done.

The video player has the basic controls and offers an option to scale the video to fit the screen. I use this option most of the time. Of course, you can also send or delete videos from the video player, or even view detailed file information about the video currently playing.

Gaming

The Satio comes with two games preloaded – Labyrinth and Sudoku.

Labyrinth is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the standard game of labyrinth but in a 3D environment, although it can be played in traditional 2D as well. You move the ball around the labyrinth by tilting the phone. Yes, the game makes use of the built-in accelerometer. There is a total of fifty different levels – from the really easy ones to the almost-impossible-to-beat hard ones.

Sudoku by Digital Chocolate is a game of math and numbers. I guess most of you know what it’s about, so I won’t be going into more details on that part. The game is perhaps the best Sudoku game available for mobile phones, and it’s got a lot of gaming value to it. You can literally play this game for hours and hours, if you’re a hardcore Sudoku enthusiast. There are different games in the so called Café and you can unlock more items and awards by winning and solving puzzles.

But what’s gaming like on the Satio? How does it make up for its lack of a physical keyboard or keypad? Well, gaming on the Satio varies a lot depending on what kind of game it is. Some games make use of the built-in accelerometer, some use the touch screen and some make use of a virtual keypad, navigation and soft keys.

Using the built-in accelerometer is quite brilliant. Like I said, the preloaded game Labyrinth makes use of the accelerometer, and there are a number of other games that put it to good use. One of these is Asphalt 4, which I’ve tried on the Satio. Admittedly, it’s a bit hard to steer the car as it’s very sensitive, but hey – it’s a challenge, right?

Some game developers have added their own controls directly in the game, i.e. a navigation area in the left corner and action buttons in the right corner of the screen. I’m not personally a huge fan of this way of gaming as it is a bit complicated, but I’m sure some will find it easier than me. Other games use the touch screen in a much simpler way, i.e. in a racing game where the upper area of the screen will make your car accelerate and the sides can be used to steer.

Finally there’s also the option to use virtual keys in Java games. This means that the effective screen resolution for games will be decreased to around 360 x 360 pixels, but it’s actually not that bad. If you don’t want the virtual keys in Java games, these can be disabled for each individual game but are enabled by default.

Speaking of Java games… The Satio is one of the best Symbian devices to run Java games as it supports a lot of Java ME technologies, also known as JSR’s. The following JSR’s are supported:

• JSR-75 PDA Optional Packages for J2ME
• JSR-82 Bluetooth Wireless Technology API
• JSR-118 MIDP 2.1
• JSR-120 Wireless Messaging API
• JSR-205 Wireless Messaging API 2.0
• JSR-135 Mobile Media API 1.1
• JSR 139 CLDC 1.1
• JSR-172 J2ME Web Services Specification
• JSR-177 Security and Trust Services API for J2ME
• JSR-179 Location API
• JSR-184 Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2ME
• JSR-211 Content Handler API
• JSR-226 SVG API for J2ME
• JSR-234 Advanced Multimedia Supplements
• JSR-248 Mobile Services Architecture
• JSR-256 Mobile Sensor API (accelerometer)

In addition to that there’s also support for the Nokia UI Extension API, Sony Ericsson’s own Capuchin and eSWT.

Camera

Still photography

The camera is one of the Satio’s greatest strengths. It’s got an autofocus CMOS camera module with a maximum effective resolution of 12 mega pixels (4000 x 3000 pixels). It’s also got a xenon flash for still photos and an LED flash for video recording.

The camera interface is very slick and it easy to see that Sony Ericsson have optimized it for finger usage. The follow camera-specific settings are available when shooting still shots:

• Scenes: Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Twilight landscape, Sports, Document, Twilight portrait, Beach/Snow
• Shoot mode: Normal, Panorama, BestPic, Smile detection, Touch capture
• Flash: Off, Auto, Red-eye reduction
• Exposure: ±2.0 in 0.3 EV steps
• Auto mode: Off, On
• Self-timer: Off, On (2 s), On (10 s)
• Picture size: 2 MP (16:9), 5 MP (4:3), 9 MP (16:9), 10 MP (3:2), 12 MP (4:3)
• Focus: Infinite, Auto, Macro, Face detection
• White balance: Auto, Incandescent, Flourescent, Daylight, Cloudy
• Image stabiliser: Off, On
• Effects: Off, Negative, Solarise, Sepia, Black & white
• Shutter sound: Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4, Off
• Auto review: Off, On
• BestPic speed: Slow, Fast
• Geotag: Off, On
• Auto rotate: Off, On
• Reset

We’ve gathered a number of original camera still samples from the Satio for you to download below. These shots have been taken with both the 9 and 12 MP settings.

Let’s start with what’s probably the most obvious – the colours. The camera pictures from Satio are generally well saturated and colours are about spot-on most of the time, especially when using the flash, although this also has a slight tendency to over-saturate things a bit.

Haven’t noticed any problems with the auto white balance on the phone, so you’ll be good leaving it at that for most of the time, except when in difficult conditions.

The level of details you can achieve with the Satio is actually quite amazing. Under the right conditions, it’s actually capable of delivering very high quality images with a high level of maintained detail. It gets worse when shooting in dimmed lighting, but that’s where the flash kicks in.

There’s no doubt the optics and software processing on the Satio are best for macro shots. This is where you’ll get the best results with the highest level of detail. It’s of course also possible to achieve similar results when shooting portraits and landscapes, but it’s harder and calls for several attempts.

As you can see from the photos, noise is perhaps the biggest problem with the photos from Satio. We’ve tried to quickly remove the noise using a third-party Photoshop plugin (NikSoft Dfine 2.0), so you can get an idea of what you can achieve:

The improvement is obvious. Sony Ericsson ought to put more research into their noise removal software and algorithms. I’ll have to note that this is a flash photo, which automatically increases the noise levels.

Video

The Satio is Sony Ericsson’s best camcorder to date, and would probably rank among the best on the market. It is capable of recording videos with the following settings:

• Resolution: 640 x 480 pixels (VGA)
• Video codec: MPEG-4 (.mp4)
• Video bitrate: 3,800 – 4,000 Kbps (variable)
• Video framerate: 29.57 frames per second
• Audio codec: AAC (.mp4a), mono
• Audio bitrate: 64 Kbps

I’m overly impressed with the video quality. Only bad thing is that you cannot use auto focus when recording videos, in other words the focus is fixed. Audio quality isn’t bad either, especially considering it’s mono channel sound! You have the following settings available when recording videos:

• Night mode: Off, On
• Microphone: Off, On
• Light: Off, On
• Exposure: ±2.0 in 0.3 EV steps
• Auto mode: Off, On
• Self-timer: Off, On (2 s), On (10 s)
• Video format: VGA (640 x 480), QVGA (320 x 240), For picture message
• White balance: Auto, Incandescent, Flourescent, Daylight, Cloudy
• Effects: Off, Negative, Solarise, Sepia, Black & white

You can download two original video samples below (right-click and save the files).

File size: 46.7 megabytes

File size: 30.6 megabytes

We’ve also got an example of how well the Satio performs in low light video recordings. This video is embedded from YouTube, and has been compressed quite a lot, but it should give you an idea of how well it performs. The transitions have been added in Windows Live Movie Maker, but apart from that nothing has been done with the footage.

Sony Ericsson has included support for both Blogger and PicasaWeb, which means you can upload your images and videos directly to these services from your phone. It’s quite a clever feature.

Communication and Web

Connectivity

When it comes to connectivity, the Satio pretty much comes with everything you can imagine. It supports quad band GSM / EDGE and dual band UMTS / HSPA networks, up to 7.2 Mbps (downlink) / 2.0 Mbps (uplink).

It’s got built-in Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR. Bluetooth transfers can be performed at speeds up to around 160 kilobytes per second. I usually keep Bluetooth enabled on my phone. That way my computer automatically connects and syncs everything between the devices. You’ll have to manually configure everything to get this kind of set up, but it shouldn’t be too hard. The phone supports the following Bluetooth profiles:

• Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP)
• Audio/Video Remote Control Profile
• Dial-up Networking Profile
• File Transfer Profile
• Generic Access Profile
• Generic Object Exchange Profile
• Handsfree Profile
• Headset Profile
• Object Push Profile
• Phonebook Access Profile
• Serial Port Profile
• SyncML OBEX binding

WLAN 802.11b and 802.11g (11 / 54 Mbps) is of course also supported, and you can also use DLNA if you want. WLAN speeds are very good – perhaps the best I’ve ever seen on a mobile handset. Particularly download speeds are impressive and on par with that on my computer. WLAN range is decent, but not brilliant. It supports all major WLAN encryption and security technologies, such as AES, EAP, PEAP, TKIP, WPA/WPA2 and WPS.

There’s naturally USB 2.0 support, and you can use the bundled USB cable to transfer files between the phone and a computer. I’d recommend using a card reader instead though – it’s much quicker.

The built-in GPS works brilliantly as  previously described. There’s no support for infrared data communication. But honestly… Do you know anyone who uses that for sending files nowadays? I don’t.

Web browser

The built-in web browser is the default S60 web browser, that makes use of the Webkit engine (like Android phones and iPhones), which is just excellent. Navigation is easy – just double tap on an area to zoom in and double tap again to zoom back out. You can use it both in portrait and landscape mode, and full screen view is of course also supported. I do miss kinetic scrolling though. It’s there – sometimes – but it’s far from as easy to use or as good as I’d like it to be.

The browser supports just about all major standards today and it seems to be capable of rendering almost all websites properly. Even the really advanced ones that make use of Javascript, Flash and advanced style sheets. Another key feature of the web browser is speed. It is perhaps one of the fastest mobile web browsers on the market. Browsing the web using the Webkit browser is nothing short of being a pleasure.

A thing I like very much is the fact that it can remember your logins on various websites. My passwords are usually rather long, and it can be a pain having to type it numerous times a day if you’re often visiting one or more websites.

There’s also a pretty basic RSS reader that, well, gets the job done in a not-so-sexy looking way.

Contacts

The phone book application is rather advanced and sports a variety of settings and features. You can basically set it up as you prefer, so that’s pretty nice.

You can browse all contacts or contacts by group (user-defined), and a small thumbnail picture of the contact will appear once highlighted – if you’ve set a photo to be contact that is. Along with a photo, you can store a lot of different kinds of information with each contact. There are plenty of fields to fill! Just check this list:

• First name
• Middle name
• Last name
• Title
• Suffix
• Mobile (+ home and business)
• Telephone (+ home and business)
• Email (+ home and business)
• Car phone
• Video call (+ home and business)
• Fax (+ home and business)
• Pager
• DTMF
• Internet telephone (+ home and business)
• Push to talk
• Share video
• SIP
• Department
• Job title
• Assistant’s name
• Assistant’s number
• Spouse
• Children
• Wed address (+ home and business)
• Address (+ home and business)
• Birthday
• Anniversary
• Note

A total of 44 contact fields that can be filled for each contact. That should do for most people, wouldn’t you agree?

You can search your contacts from the phone book as well. It’s an intelligent search feature, that will automatically list the results as you type and it’ll also filter out any unnecessary letters.

Calls and Messaging

Calls

You can do both audio and video calls on the Satio. Call quality is excellent and I have had no issues with background noise during calls. Overall signal reception is also very good. I haven’t had any dropped calls with this phone.

There are a number of ways to call someone, i.e. from a message, phone book, favourites or by using the dialer.

It’s easy to do conference calls. You simply have to call someone, then access the dialer during the call to call another person, after which you can merge the calls to a conference call. Quite brilliant.

The phone keeps a log of your calls and orders them by type – missed, incoming and outgoing calls.

Messaging

Messaging on the Satio is not bad, but it’s not superb either. There’s no support for graphical smilies, and being an avid user of Sony Ericsson phones, this is quite a huge let-down for me. Fortunately you can quickly access the most commonly characters, such as a colon and parenthesis, to create a smiley.

The messaging editor is the same as any of text input mode on the device. I’m mainly using the alphanumerical keypad, as I think this is the easiest one to use, but there are a few bugs to watch out for. Sometimes it’ll replace letters with others or it’ll change the letter casing. The built-in T9 dictionary isn’t up to the usual Sony Ericsson standards either, and it acts quite peculiarly at times as well. If you have previously typed an ‘a’ using the dictionary, it’ll dismiss all other letters associated with that key – i.e. ‘b’ and ‘c’. You’ll have to manually add these letters to the dictionary after that in order for it to work. And that’s the story with each key and letter. Quite annoying, to say the least.

Other than that, messaging works as expected. You’ll have various different folders such as inbox, drafts and sent items. You can sort the messages by date or in a long list of items. I tend to keep them sorted by date. You can view conversations in a chat view with the default messaging application, but there’s a separate third-party application available for that, which comes preloaded on the device. You can check out some screenshots of it below.

E-mail

It’s super easy to set up your e-mail on the phone. You’ll just need to fill in a few details and that’s it. You’re done. The phone supports both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols, and although I’m only using the POP3 protocol, I’m confident that the IMAP4 protocol will also work just fine.

It seems to work quite well. Just make sure to take a look at the default settings as you’ll probably want to change them a bit. I was initially wondering why it took so long to connect to the server, but I then realized that it was set to download all emails in the inbox (about 14,000 messages). A quick change to a more appropriate setting made it a lot faster.

Attachments and signatures are supported without problems. It can be set up to automatically check for new emails at a given interval. It supports multiple accounts. It’s a very good e-mail client. I love using it!

Performance benchmarking

Something quite curious happened during our second benchmark of the phone. Our initial benchmark had shown results between 20 and 30 frames per second, hence the text in the video, but our most recent benchmarks all ended up around 15-16 frames per second [note: the December firmware update brought along performance improvements]. To be fair, this was a fair frame rate and definitely usable for games, etc. Most games will run much quicker though, as this is quite a complex benchmark that does not make use of OpenGL ES (also found in JSR 239).

We use the industry standard 3DMarkMobile JSR 184 to benchmark and test the performance of review handsets. For details and more information about the 3DMarkMobile benchmarks please visit the official website at www.futuremark.com.

Recommended applications

Below you’ll find a list of recommended applications for Satio. If you have anything to add, feel free to post a comment below with your additions and comments – we’ll be sure to add it to the list!

• Gravity
• Asphalt 4
• Snaptu
• Spb TV
• Opera Mini
• X-plore
• Handy Alarm Pro
• Handy Taskman
• Fring
• QuickOffice 6
• Gameloft HD games

Conclusion

There’s no doubt the Satio is a good sign of change at Sony Ericsson and perhaps a glimpse at what’s to come, not only from Sony Ericsson but all the manufacturers. But there’s no such thing as being perfect, and that’s definitely not something I’d call the Satio either. It’s still got a lot of stuff that annoys me and features that are missing, but it’s still a very good mix of features.

The camera is undoubtedly one of the prime features of the Satio and I reckon many people would buy or consider buying the phone purely because of the camera. I’ll admit that it was one of my primary reasons for getting the Satio, despite having a much, much better professional grade dSLR – having a decent camera on you at all time is something you’ll end up appreciating. Another positive side of the Satio is its media functionality, which is without a doubt among the best of its class. Sony Ericsson’s Media application works brilliantly, and although it lacks a few features (which will hopefully be added in future firmware revisions!), I would reckon it makes up for it on speed and user friendliness. Another reason to get the Satio could be its web features. While the web browser isn’t excellent, it’s still a very good browser that’s capable of doing just about everything you need it to do.

When it comes to the cons of the Satio, there really isn’t a lot that cannot be improved or fixed with software updates. Sure, you can’t reduce the size of the device or add a 3.5 mm jack with a software update, but it’s possible to improve performance, add more preloaded applications (such as the Facebook application!), add features (such as an equalizer in the music player) and so forth. If you can live with a few compromises, I’m sure Satio will be a perfect match.

This review was written based on retail units running software revision R1BB041 and R1CA037.

Final grade: 82 %