We have been waiting for this touchscreen Symbian sweetie to arrive ever since it was announced in February this year.

With the standard UIQ user interface gone, we were waiting to see what the Sony Ericsson boys could do with Symbian S60 5th edition.

The Sony Ericsson Satio is offered in black, silver and maroon. The review unit was a maroon though we would have liked to see a black one instead.

Styling wise, the phone looks more like a camera than a phone. It appears sleek on the front. It also feels sleek in the hand but when viewed from the side, the lens cover that’s jutting out makes the Satio look pudgy.

The Call, Menu and End Call buttons are below the 3.5in screen. Above the screen, you will find the proximity sensor, secondary camera and speaker. At the top of the Satio, you will find the speaker and the power button.

On the left, you find the screen unlock switch, Sony Ericsson’s proprietary connectivity port and the microSD card slot. To your right, you get the volume rocker/camera zoom control, playback button, camera/video mode switch and capture button.

On the back, you find the lens cover which automatically turns on the camera when slid off.

SHARP SHOOTER: The camera on the Satio deserves praise for the range of functions and decent quality of photos overall.

Feature-packed

The processor powering the Satio is an ARM Cortex A8 600MHz with a PowerVR SGX graphics chip which is similar to the iPhone and packs a lot of power.

There’s 128MB of internal memory to store contacts and 256MB RAM. The Satio can support microSD cards of up to 32 B so there’s no worry of running out of space.

The 3.5in touchscreen is sensitive enough that you only need to tap it lightly. It’s also precise so that your taps do not stray.

The screen provides excellent colour and contrast. Outdoors, it performs pretty well.

However, the screen can’t shine through on our super sunny Malaysian afternoons which is quite acceptable as most phones don’t have very good legibility under bright sunlight.

The Satio performs the basic phone functions admirably. Voice quality is clear.

Accessing your address book is made easy with the Symbian’s index name search that minimises scrolling through your entire address book.

You can send and receive SMS and MMS easily. E-mail can easily be set up as well.

Now, normally, Sony Ericsson phones with their Flash UI sort the SMS in a threaded/conversation view whereas Symbian phones have them sorted by date.

Sony tries to bring the threaded view back, but you can only find this feature in the Chat section. It’s not really a big issue to have this feature as long as you know how to do it.

The Satio has all the bases covered when it comes to connectivity. It handles GSM, GPRS, 3G, Wi-Fi, USB and Bluetooth. Lots of pixels

IN A ROW: All the camera control buttons are on the right of the Satio.

The camera on the Satio deserves to be praised and rightly so. Even though cramming in a tiny 12-megapixel sensor does have its drawbacks on image quality, the Satio’s photos turned out pretty nicely.

It excels in taking daylight images. When in a low-light conditions, a steady hand is a must even with image stabilisation on.

The reason why the Satio feels more like a camera than a phone is it has all the wonderful functions found in Sony’s Cyber-shot cameras such as Smile Detect which snaps the picture only when the subject smiles, Best Pic which takes multiple images and suggests the best one for you and finally Touch Focus where the camera will focus upon the area that you tap on the screen and then snap the picture.

The camera captures video in 640 x 480-pixel resolution which is encoded in MP4. Videos were smooth and crisp with excellent clarity.

Media playback

Sony have replicated the Walkman-style Media Centre for the Symbian OS. It organises media into Music, Photos and Videos.

I’ll go through each category. For Music, it works as expected. Songs are sorted by album, artist and title. It would’ve been nice if songs could be searched by the title or artist where you could type it in.

The sound quality is alright, but there is no equaliser function. To me, the Satio could use one as the sound is more high pitched than we would have liked.

The visualisation is interesting and rather hypnotic. Try tapping it when there is a song playing and you’ll see what I mean. Sadly, there’s only one visualisation.

Photos are displayed in a scrolling fashion where you can sweep your finger across the screen to proceed to the next or previous image.

The transitions were smooth and slick. You can access photos from the phone or from an online location.

As for videos, you can access YouTube videos and podcasts.

The video player is nothing fancy and works as expected. Videos play brilliantly on the huge screen but it would’ve been nice to pair it up with decent stereo speakers instead of the mono speaker the phone has.

In addition, you can always turn on Flight Mode to use the media player functions on flights and in hospitals.

Productivity tools

The RoadSync application allows you to link to an Exchange mail server to access corporate e-mail message, appointments and contacts.

As usual, you get the Symbian calculator, calendar and note applications. The QuickOffice and Adobe PDF applications allow you to read Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.

However, you have to purchase the full edition of QuickOffice to be able to edit files. The Adobe PDF also comes with a 30 day trial and you have to purchase a full license if you need it.

Entertainment

Sony Ericsson has loaded a couple of PlayStation games that they’ve ported to the Satio. You’ll find them on the microSD Card. We got Prince of Persia and Asphalt 4.

We haven’t played the original games on the PlayStation but we are not to happy with the slow speed of the games.

The Satio comes with the WisePilot GPS software preinstalled so you don’t have to install other GPS software.

WisePilot is without doubt a good GPS software with voice directions.

The GPS hardware however is not up to par with the software. It took about two minutes to get a position lock when we were outside on a clear day.

Symbian’s positioning application also suffered from the same symptoms.

It’s rather strange that the Google Maps application managed to get a position lock fairly quickly even when we were indoors.

This leads us to conclude that perhaps the Symbian OS and it’s services have not been properly optimised with the Satio’s hardware.

Battery life is a bit short. If you use it heavily in the course of a day for GPS, photo taking and media playback in addition to your phone calls, expect to charge it by the end of the day.

Moderate usage for phone calls and messaging alone should get you about 2.5 days of usage. There is a supplied charger and the Satio can still be charged via USB.

Conclusion

Actually, with all the hype surrounding the Satio, we felt rather letdown.

The Sony Ericsson Satio has a habit of auto restarting once in a while (about every tow days). You get a two second lag when trying to unlock the screen, as if the phone was trying to wake itself from sleep mode.

The intermittent lags and hangs failed to convince us that it was running on some really powerful hardware.

The lags and hangs get worse if the theme is changed from the original theme which is quite peculiar.

All of this could be due to the unstable firmware on the Satio. Having said that, Sony has offered an update to improve the performance of the Satio but it seems that update has not been rolled out to the Malaysian market yet as we couldn’t update the review unit.

It looks like Sony Ericsson tried really hard to cram in a lot of features but but it just didn’t manage to optimise the Symbian OS and its apps for the Satio’s awesome hardware.

We still have faith in the company to fix the flaws in future firmware updates.

Pros: Excellent camera; GPS software is good

Cons: Buggy and slow software; no DivX and Xvid support; lacks 3.5mm jack; missing equaliser function; many other small quirks.

update: According to Sony Ericsson, the Satio firmware update is now available via Sony Ericsson’s online support site. It’s very important that you back up your phone before upgrading the firmware to prevent any loss of information. Also, you can call Sony Ericsson’s helpline at 1800-88-9900 for assistance before upgrading.