3UK have just announced that they are now selling the Sony Ericsson Satio, a 12 megapixel cameraphone, which will cost £30 per month on an 18-month contract with the Mix’n'Match 300 tariff, or £399.99 on PAYG.  As well as the impressive camera, the phone features touch focus, face detection, and a Xenon flash.  As a 3UK phone, it features Skype on 3 and Windows Live Messenger as well.  The phone features a 16:9 640×360 3.5″ widescreen display for playback of those pictures and videos, but there are other, sometimes overlooked features on this phone, such as the 12x digital zoom, geotagging of photos, image stabilizer, as well as all the other features and applications one would expect of a Symbian 5th Edition touchscreen device, including an accelerometer, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

In fact generally there aren’t many downsides to this device; the 1000mAh battery worries us slightly, as this sounds a little low for a good day’s usage (why oh why do smartphones force a daily charge), and our only other concern area is how much effort Sony Ericsson put into firmware updates for the device, as often seems needed on Symbian (or other smartphone OS) devices.  Oh, and the final issue with the device (which isn’t really an issue, but something to be aware of); most Nokia specific Symbian applications may not work on the device, so don’t expect the full Nokia suite of apps on this device.  Of course, it ships with Google Maps, which often negates the need for Nokia / Ovi Maps (don’t forget to take out the £5 per month Internet Add-On with this phone, as it will be well worth it), and other apps such as Nokia Sportstracker won’t work either (although a quick look through other Symbian applications should soon find a worthy free alternative).

3UK are continuing to innovate both at the lower end of the price market, and still signing up powerful high spec devices like this too, and this bodes well for next year…

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.