However I found a magic cure, at least for my problem.

I went to the service menu (red twice, green once, red twice, green once, red twice) and then Service Tests. Go to GPS and then there is an option to Purge Assistance Data.

After purging the data, the GPS locked almost instantly! W00t!

Today, Sony Ericsson fixed this.

It’s not an optimal solution, because what they’ve done is release a standalone app that you use to set the EQ profile. This pre-set will persist after closing the app and after turning phone on and off. Seems to me to be a front end to Symbian configuration files, but that’s just speculation. There are apparently technical reasons why it can’t be included in the media player, which is a pity, but hopefully this will be rectified in the future.

In the mean time, I’d like to applaud Sony Ericsson for rectifying a shortcoming in the Satio in some form. Download now for free from PlayNow. You’ll need the latest firmware however.

Source.

• Support for WVGA video recording – The already great video recording will be enhanced to fit the wide screen format and hence resolution is also slightly increased to 864 * 480 pixles. (the preset size will still be VGA, user has to change to get WVGA)
• Upload of pictures to Facebook – It will be possible to upload pictures directly from the picture menu you have on the home screen or from the Media UI.
• Youtube video uploading – It will be possible to upload videos to Youtube directly from the Media UI.
• Conversational messaging – “Conversations” will be nicely integrated in the messaging menu in order to easily find and inspire to more conversations with your friends.
• DLNA support – The new software will support DLNA media server for easy transfer of audio and still pictures. (Note that video is not supported)
• UI improvements – On top of above, several minor UI improvements have been done in order to optimize the user experience.
• The Facebook application that is now available on PlayNow for free download will be included in the sw.

I’m impressed with the video resolution upgrade. A lot of people wanted HD video as found in the Vivaz, but that was never going to happen as it would remove a unique selling point of the Vivaz. It also would have been difficult to implement for hardware reasons – the Vivaz has a 720 MHz processor compared to the 600 MHz processor in the Satio. I know the Samsung i8910 has HD video and uses the same 600 MHz processor as the Satio, but it’s been plagued by frame rate issues and audio sync problems. I think the extra 20% processing power is probably necessary. That said, Sony Ericsson could have just left us Satio owners with VGA video, but they didn’t, they increased the resolution and actually improved the handset rather than just fixing broken bits. I suspect it’s a typo in the announcement, 854 * 480 is more likely since that’s still 16:9.

Facebook and Youtube uploading will be greatly appreciated. I know uploading is currently possible by means of the Web Publishing app, but it’s fiddly and involves entering custom email addresses. One touch upload is just the kind of polish that was lacking and we all wanted originally.

Conversations isn’t new, but by default it was buried in Entertainment > Chat > Conversations. Not exactly intuitive. I’m not sure that there’s anything wrong with it, but if they’ve managed to integrate it nicely into a blade in the Messaging app I’d be happy. Sure, I’ll probably still never use it, but that’s out of choice rather than because it was inconvenient before.

DLNA is a good thing, because it’s an international standard and implemented on hundreds of millions of other devices. Don’t know I’ve ever used it… but that doesn’t matter.

I’m certainly intrigued by “UI improvements”. I hope this is the ability to change the active panels like on the Vivaz along with kinetic scrolling, but if I’m honest, I expect it’s not.

Facebook app built in – excellent. This was one of the biggest gripes people had with the Satio, that it advertised Facebook support and didn’t appear to have it. Sure the app has been around for ages, but lots of people never downloaded it or couldn’t find it. Hope it’s not one of the rubbish Java ones however.

I plan on loading this new firmware as soon as I can and letting you all know how it stacks up.

Source.

So what happens when you press that PlayNow button on your main menu? First of all, the browser fires up. It doesn’t however open one window, it opens two. One shows a mobile version of the PlayNow website, and the other is just blank. This isn’t immediately obvious because the Symbian browser doesn’t do tabs and there’s no user controllable way to open a new window, although once multiple windows are open you can switch between them via Menu > Display Options > Switch Window, which then gives whole page overviews of each open window that you can flick between. You can also close a window as well, as opposed to exiting the browser.

This two windows thing is nonsense. Firstly, one of the pages is entirely blank and navigating to it (which is pretty long winded) and then closing it proves that it’s not needed for the PlayNow store to work. The bigger problem though is that if you open up the PlayNow store and then you decide you don’t want to do anything in it, you’ll probably press the right softkey option, which is marked Close. The issue is that whilst it closes the PlayNow store window and drops you back to the main menu, it doesn’t close the blank window, it leaves it running, taking up memory, using the processor and ultimately, affecting the battery life. Might only be a little bit, but it all matters.

I can’t actually replicate this behaviour with other websites, which is good because it means if someone closes a window, they immediately see they have other windows still running and close them. The fact it doesn’t work this way for the PlayNow store shows that it needs a little bit of work done to it.

The next point for consideration is the whole experience of buying apps.

What happens when you reset your phone and lose an app you spent money on downloading? I tried this with one of the few apps in the store, Best Taskman (excellent little app by the way). When I purchased this, my network connection went out of range during the download and I was never able to get the file to finish downloading. I tried going to the My Account section of PlayNow, expecting to be able to download the file again. But guess what? It wasn’t there. No option to download again. I had to raise a ticket with support for them to credit it to my account so I could download it all over again.

That’s rubbish. Seriously, I want an iTunes style download-five-times type thing so I can at least re-download my apps should I lose them.

Or at the very least, give me a registration code, tied to my IMEI number or something like that. Because there isn’t one. It’s a one time download and that’s all. Pathetic.

I bought Best Taskman on a Thursday night. My ticket wasn’t responded to until the Saturday. Not exactly a good source of instant gratification.

All I can say at this point is that PlayNow is woefully inadequate.

The options you get there include things like display tests, total call times, vibration tests, MAC addresses for the wi-fi and many more. If you ever want to buy a second hand Satio, it’s a good way of making sure it’s in full working order.

I agree with the sentiments of the first four – a half finished flagship, absolutely woeful online strategy and not properly marketing your best product. The 5th blunder was an open one. Having pondered over this for the past day, I’m split. I came up with two main blunders, both of which have far wider reaching consequences than buggy firmware on the N97. So here’s both.

#5a: Underpowered Flagship Phones
A 434 MHz ARM11 processor is fine in your low-mid range smartphone like the 5800. It performs well and gives a good bang to buck ratio. If you spent less than £200 on your SIM free handset, you probably won’t care if there’s a split second of lag when you open apps or hit the menu key. You’ve got a fully fledged smartphone for the price of an LG feature phone. That’s a great deal.

However, the N97 has basically the same hardware as the 5800. Sure it has a lot of internal memory, a better camera and a keyboard. And all that’s nice. But it doesn’t have extra grunt. It doesn’t respond faster, it’s not snappier and it just doesn’t do more. And when your flagship costs 2-3x more than your mid-range product, it really should. The N97 really needed to be packing the same hardware as the Satio or the i8910. It was available when Nokia designed the N97, they just got miserly.

#5b: Lack Of Commitment To Symbian/S60
Nokia could have won the smartphone wars in 2009. In fact, they probably should have given that Symbian had something like a 200 million unit headstart on the iPhone and Android. The fact Nokia didn’t shows that they seem to lack direction.

One of the major reasons in the iPhone becoming so wildly successful is that it has a huge selection of apps, which drives sales, which drives further app development, which drives even more sales. Ad infinium. Ignore the fact that 99% of the 100,000 apps are rubbish for a minute and you get left with a solid fact – Nokia needed Symbian to have more apps and a single, or at least integated, on-device, app store. Ovi is too little, too late. Symbian needed something excellent back when the N95 was top dog, but Nokia failed to capitalise.

A related point is that every iPhone is a smartphone. Not every Nokia is a smartphone. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the 1100 and 1202 et al are not aimed at smartphone users and that they are just too underpowered and cheap to even consider turning the low-end range into smartphones. But it’s the middle ground they screwed up in. Case in point: the 6600. It was announced in April 2009, launched in August 2009. It runs S40. This was a step backward from the 6220, which was announced in February 2008 and released in July 2008, as the 6220 ran S60. The 6220, on the other hand, had been progress from the 6300 running S40 (announced November 2006, released January 2007).

Nokia looked like they’d got it. Their bread and butter was those mid-range devices that sold by the millions. Give the mid-range the full smartphone capabilities, give the masses an easy way of buying stuff on impulse, sit back and rake in the cash. Yet, instead of deciding that every 5, 6 and 7-series phone released from 2008 onwards would be an S60 phone with on-device purchasing – and therefore a good solid platform, if not developer nirvana – Nokia carried on messing about with S40. And the worst part? The X3 shows that they still are.

It is just stupid. Nokia need to give developers a baseline that stands still and they need to sell enough units to make Symbian an attractive platform to invest in. S40 cannibalises S60/Symbian’s marketshare.

To claw back some of the lost ground, Nokia need to flood the mid-range with smartphones. Even if it means the phones have to have beefier hardware and that Nokia subsidise the cost a little, it is the only way. I say that because the money is no longer just in the expensive high-end handsets or the Walmart volume low-end, it’s in the apps. And Ovi ain’t enough.

There are some encouraging signs though. The 5-series touchscreen phones have been great products, bringing smartphone capability to £100 handsets. Nokia just now need to replicate that across all of their midrange and they might just manage to undo 2009.

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.

Read the full article here.