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December 21st, 2009 
Biggles So far I have linked to other reviews of the Satio. But now that I have one and have been using it for a couple of months, what do I think?
The Camera
This is the Satio’s biggest selling point, being a 12.1 MP camera with a xenon flash for photography and LED flash for video. It’s excellent. It doesn’t have optical zoom, but aside from that the Satio easily replaces any digicam. It’s not DSLR territory, but then again, no Nikon is gonna slip into my jacket pocket. There’s a bunch of features including touch capture, where you just press on screen what you want to focus on; smile detection; panorama, which uses the accelerometer to help stitch photos together and BestPic, which is a burst capture mode. Over and above that you have focus settings like infinite focus, macro mode, auto and facial detection. Then there’s geo-tagging which works with the built in GPS. There’s also image stabilisation, which is quite a high end feature for a cameraphone. Usual digital camera features like self-timer and colour effects such as sepia or negative colours also make an appearance. In a later article we’ll go through the full range of camera options, but in short, the camera is absolutely fantastic.
The Screen
The screen is a 3.5″, 16m colour, resistive touchscreen. I’m on the fence about resistive versus capacitive. Sure, capacitive is cooler and supports multi-touch, but the Satio’s screen is very sensitive and resistive screens work with a stylus, which is better for handwriting recognition and the small benefit for some of working with gloves on. I’ve also used some of the drawing applications you can get for Symbian phones, such as Paint Pad, which work far better with a stylus than with fingers, so there really is pros and cons to both kinds of screens.
What I do know is that the 640 * 360 (16:9) resolution is considerably better than that of the iPhone or Blackberry and is good for movies, which is handy since included in the box is a voucher for 60 free movie downloads from Sony’s PlayNow service.
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Hi i have a question concerning the GPS, how sensitive is it? Also, are there any satnav software with turn by turn nav that uses maps store on the phone as to not incur any data charges? Thank you very much
I was going to write about GPS and sat-nav at some point in the future, clearly I took too long
The GPS is of average sensitivity – it’s gets a signal in all the same places as my N-series Nokias do and is about as good as that in the iPhones. It took me 21 seconds to get a lock indoors at my desk. Seems pretty decent to me, certainly a bit faster than my N82. That said, with Network Assistance turned on, I got an accurate position in Google Maps in under 10 seconds.
Sadly, the Wisepilot that comes on the phone uses an internet connection, so that probably won’t suit you. However Route 66 does use maps stored on the phone for turn by turn navigation, so that probably do what you need as long as they have maps for your country. You could also install Ovi Maps on a hacked phone
Hope that answers your query! Please do check back for further information!