By Aaron Tan, a freelance writer

THE Sony Ericsson Satio is close to fulfilling every gadget lover's dream.

That is, to pack a powerful digital camera, music player and productivity tools in a single device.

Tipped as a multimedia phone, the Satio combines the hallmarks of Sony's Walkman music players and Cybershot digital cameras.

Click on thumbnail to view (Photos: Sony Ericsson)

Though packed with a 12.1-megapixel camera and large 3.5-inch touchscreen, the doodad, at 126g, feels lighter than most smartphones of a similar screen size.

Its digital photography prowess is augmented with regular digital camera features like scene modes, auto focus, auto flash and smile detection.

The pretty pictures it takes are comparable to those snapped by dedicated digital cameras. Although most photos appeared vibrant, images of subjects taken a distance away using digital zoom appeared pixellated.

An optical zoom lens would have made the phone too bulky, so this is something consumers would have to contend with until the liquid optical zoom lenses being researched by A*Star become widely available. These lenses take up less space.

Touch interface is built on the Symbian S60 mobile phone operating system which has a bad reputation for delayed responses to user actions.

I experienced occasional lags when switching from one application to another and when I was loading some new messages.

Typing on the Satio using the touchscreen Qwerty keyboard was better than expected with a good level of accuracy.

The only problem was in correcting typo errors: it was difficult to use a finger to point the text cursor to the exact letter I wanted to correct.

A stylus is bundled with the phone but it is unlikely anyone would use a finger and stylus together while composing messages.

Now, on to the screen: a sensor switches the gadget between portrait and landscape modes when you rotate the phone accordingly.

The sensor, however, is not sensitive enough. At times, the phone stays in landscape mode even when you have already turned the device to a vertical position.

Browsing the Internet on the Satio was a pleasant experience: websites load quickly on both 3G and Wi-Fi connections.

Zooming in on Web pages, which requires double-tapping on the touchscreen, is a hit-and-miss affair.

The touchscreen does not recognise my double-taps most of the time and I find myself using the onscreen zoom button to zero in on Web pages.

Preinstalled applications are aplenty.

From RoadSync, which lets you hook up to a corporate Microsoft Exchange mailbox, to the Quickoffice mobile office productivity suite to even a Sudoku game, there is bound to be something fun or useful.

Like most other Sony Ericsson Walkman phones, the music quality of the Satio is unparalleled, with sufficient bass and detail reproduced from MP3 sound tracks.

For a flagship model, however, it is disappointing that Sony Ericsson did not include a 3.5mm headphone jack that allows me to hook this phone up to my own sound buds.

A feature-packed phone like the Satio naturally consumes more battery power. The phone went flat after a full day of text messaging, voice calls, Internet browsing over Wi-Fi and streaming a handful of YouTube videos.

Final say

While the Satio has oodles of features and an excellent camera to boot, user interface kinks need to be addressed.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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