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By Aaron Tan, a freelance writer
| Sony Ericsson Satio |
» Price: $1,098 (without plan)
» Available: from authorised dealers |
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.
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(Photos: Sony Ericsson) |
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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.
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