Review: The Sony Satio 12mp Camera Phone - Re-visited (Phones)

As a phone - it's okay. It has a great screen (the built in videos are quite impressive) although it's not as colourful as the Nokia's OLED screen. Acceptable touch screen - although I'm not a big fan - so never really got completely used to (or happy) using this phone. The stylus seems quite loose - which has resulted in me loosing it once, and nearly loosing it a second time. The phone feels a little cheap - very plastic - although the sliding lens cover is quite nice and the shutter button feels decent. It's interesting (and a little surprising) to see Sony ditch Sony M2 memory cards and instead include an 8gb Micro SD cards. (It looks like Sony are doing the same with all their cameras and giving the option of Sony MS or standard SD cards).

It's got WIFI, GPS, a huge 3.5" screen, and almost everything else you expect from a modern phone (except for a facebook / twitter app etc which are noticeably missing), and surprisingly it doesn't have built in stereo speakers, instead it only has one internal speaker.

Another thing noticeably missing is a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and the new MicroUSB charging standard - instead it uses Sony Ericssons standard connection, and provides an adapter for when you want to plug some earphones in (which then ties up the connection so you can't use it for anything else like connecting it to your computer).

The earphones look better than the ones shown on the box but come with a really short cable so you can't use them with anything else - they sound fairly clear, but seem to lack bass, and the rubber fittings aren't as rubbery as they should be. (Cheap £8 Creative Labs EP-630/A Noise Isolating Earphones (Sennheisers duplicates/copies?) sound much better than the provided Sony earphones).

The Nokia N86 seems to have slightly better mp3 playback quality - and nearly no background hiss - whereas the Sony has noticeable background hiss when not playing anything. The Sony also distorts above 70% volume, with 80, 90 and 100% adding no extra volume other than additional distortion.

Software - Symbian S6 v5 - the buggy touchscreen version of the software - so buggy at one point that the phones were recalled / withdrawn from sale until they had a software update for the phone(s) involved (including the Nokia N97). Although it's been updated with Sony's own home screen(s): Quick contacts, Web shortcuts (default to the fairly horrible built in web browser), Home with Music, keypad, media, messages, and a Google maps shortcut, Photos (shows your most recent photos), and Shortcuts which can be customised.

The built in photo / media viewer seems quite poor - for example in and mode (portrait or landscape) - zooming into the photo doesn't fill the whole screen (see examples).

As a camera - it's better than most camera phones - simply because it's got a real flash. It's also got a focus assist lamp. But compared to real cameras - it's very slow to switch on - slow to focus - and slow to take the photo. Colour is good - bright and saturated - without being overly saturated and there is very little ghosting or "white-out" / lens flare.

Flash photo - camera flashes compared.

As mentioned above, the shutter button feels quite good with a two step process - half press to lock focus and fully press to take the photo (much better than the Nokia N86). It's strange that the camera doesn't have the "Cybershot" branding - even though previous Sony Ericsson phones have had the branding - even "lowly" 5mp camera phones.

 

Macro with flash on.

Focusing indoors in low light is mostly successful, although 1/10 is probably out of focus. The camera does a very good job of toning down the flash when taking macro photos with flash - which is quite impressive as often normal cameras struggle with this. (see the Delonghi Cafe Treviso Coffee Machine Review for numerous examples)

16:9 Aspect Ratio

Speed / Timings:
Switch phone off: 12 seconds.
Switch phone on: 35 seconds
Switch from phone to camera: 2 seconds
Continuous shooting "BestPic" mode (without flash): takes 9 photos at 9fps, at 12mp - then you can save one or all of them (or any number of pictures you want).
Menu speeds are fairly slow.

Touch focus is quite neat - and lets you press the screen where you want to focus and it'll take a photo. Overall having a 12 megapixel camera on your phone is overkill - particularly if you're only going to be uploading them to facebook! Even a 1 megapixel camera would be good enough for facebook - with it's 604 pixel wide photos (less than VGA resolution).

Photo editing options (same as Nokia N86) - the options are brightness, contrast, sharpness, resize, crop, rotate, annotate, clipart, text, something, square, red-eye reduction, black and white, sepia, something, shame there isn't the option to increase saturation / colour. (Using the contrast option does a good job of increasing colour though)

Video recording is better than the previous Sony camera phone (the C905) - it now records VGA/30fps but nothing spectacular or impressive like HD or 720p (like most real cameras). The phone also has a video light that you can use to light dark subjects.

Overall - this is a usable phone - with an excellent camera and flash for a camera phone. If you want an excellent camera on your phone, this is the best currently available (as you should be able to see in the included sample photos) mainly thanks to it being one of the only current camera phones to feature a real flash, but other aspects of the phone are a little annoying (lack of built in facebook / twitter apps, slow software and initial bugs). The touchscreen isn't really good enough to convert me into a touchscreen user, and I much prefer the buttons on other phones. Also, you would most likely get better results from a compact camera, with even budget cameras offering a 3x or 4x optical zoom lens, 10 or 12 megapixel sensor, and more photo options.

Pros:
Real Xenon flash
Large 3.5" screen
Good shutter button

Cons:
Cheap build quality
Poor touchscreen
Sony charging connection, and no 3.5mm jack built in

Nb. The fairly poor / average photos of the Sony Satio were taken with the Nokia N86.

Sony Ericsson Satio 12.1 Megapixel Camera Phone (Phones)

Ah Sony... you take Nokia's Symbian operating system and make is so much better... yet you still fail at providing advertised features! Your advert shows Facebook, Twitter, all integrated into the phone... yet they're not, and Sony's own blog recommends using snaptu, or symabook (in ALPHA!) to get this functionality...



THE SONY BOX features a mystery facebook app - but is this on the phone, pre-loaded, or available anywhere? Not to my knowledge...

Someone, somewhere*** says you can upload images STRAIGHT to Facebook - this is simply not possible without MANUALLY adding your own personalised email address to the phone! And where's the direct uploading to Twitter? Nowhere, it doesn't exist. The phone comes with built in setup to send photos to message (MMS, email), bluetooth, To web - which features Blogger*, PicasaWeb, Webalbum**, Flickr, Youtube, and Other...

"Other" lets you add stuff, for example, you can add your personalized facebook email address to and this will work quite well to upload photos (you can also send MMS to facebook's email address, and add them as a contact to speed up the process), without you having to spend money sending MMS messages.

* Blogger is most annoying of all, this will upload your photos to a brand new blog on blogger.com - how about letting us upload to our own already existing blog?

** Webalbum takes you to Sony's "PlayNow" website, and simply says "There are no items available" so basically doesn't work.

*** will confirm source.

I'll update this further on the phone... but for now, I'm slightly unimpressed. And what happened to the Cybershot branding?

Links: Flickr Satio Photos

And on the subject of Symbian - it seems like Sony and Nokia are using Symbian for some unknown reason, like these projects started years ago before they realised that they should be developing for Android. Motorola "decided to axe the entire Symbian product line as well as phones using several other operating systems." (NYTimes) and have just released one of the most impressive new phones: The Motorola Droid based on Android 2.0. Even Nokia seem to be hedging their bets by developing new phones with Linux based operating systems: The Nokia N900 / based on Maemo.

If web connectivity and the ability to upload to social networking sites isn't built into the core of a mobile phone operating system these days, then it just isn't good enough, and releasing apps (Sony), patches (Nokia), and updates for features that should have come with the phone, isn't the right way to go about it. By the time your updates are available, people will have already jumped ships, and will simply be "putting up" with the phone until they can get out of their contract, or get rid of their phone, to switch to an iPhone, or an Android phone.