Twin peaks - Review of the Sony Ericsson Aino and Satio

Phones these days have large screens with high resolution cameras and can double up as great multimedia devices too. But there seems to be no end in sight to the mad race for improvement. An ideal example is the latest high-end offerings from Sony Ericsson, the Satio and Aino.



The Satio is the more expensive of the two at Rs 35,950. The first thing that strikes you when you hold the phone is the 3.5” screen which is designed for a 16:9 format and is ultra bright. The 640x360 pixels make the display truly amazing. While the touch user interface did not appeal to me much, its response to touch was really good.

It features a 12.1 megapixel camera with a smile shutter, which means it will only take a picture when the subject is smiling — don’t ask me how you will click a frowning man. The camera also has touch focus and Xenon flash. It comes with Geotagging and face detection, and also has red-eye reduction, Sony’s very own Best Pic application and video blogging. The video light makes shooting videos in dimly lit areas error-free. It also supports 16x digital zoom.
The Satio runs on a Symbian OS and you can get a lot of other applications to use along with the built-in video calling, 3D games, FM radio and video streaming applications. Despite all the hardware, the Satio weighs just 126 grams. The phone, however, is available only in black and comes with a 128 MB in-built memory.

Still, the Aino, with its pristine white finish and the bundled Bluetooth stereo headset, appealed to me more. Interestingly, the phone and the headset are charged using a single docking station. Since the Bluetooth device is attached using a 3.5-mm jack, you can just pull it out and plug in your favourite headphones if you like it that way. The stereo sound and the clear bass made the sound quality really impressive.
But what appealed to me more than the Rs 28,950 price tag was the slide-up keyboard. The 3” screen seemed tiny in front of the Satio, but Sony claims it is scratchproof — I could not test this.



The Aino also has built-in Wi-Fi that allows it to synchronise media with Play Station 3 or a PC. The Aino also gives you remote play access to videos, television shows and photos at the press of a button.
And to top it all, it features an 8 megapixel camera with 16x digital zoom. The Aino, too, features face detection, geotagging as well as the send-to-web feature, which you can use over 3G or Wi-Fi.

But the Aino, at 134 gram, weighs more than its costlier cousin. The phone has an in-bulit memory of 55MB and comes with an 8 GB Micro SD Card included with the phone. Thankfully, Sony has finally given up its proprietary memory stick pro to switch over to Micro SD. While the phone has a GSM talktime of roughly 13 hours, the battery can last up to 36 hours if it is used purely to play music. Standard features such as Video calling (3G only), Exchange Active Sync, Instant Messaging, Auto rotate, FM radio with RDS and YouTube make this phone a real show-stopper.

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The above review appeared in the Indian Express on Sunday, 15th November 2009