Sony Ericsson Satio

I admit: I didn’t jump on the “hip new phone with all kinds of bells and whistles” bandwagon yet. I’m very content with my small, sturdy Nokia. However one has to admit that there is a certain kind of wow effect when one looks at phones like the Sony Ericsson Satio. Even though I had some bad experience with Sony Ericsson phones in the past (in my opinion they are the “looks shiny but don’t expect it to last more than a year” category), this phone looks nice.

It has all the features one would expect from such a phone (quad-band, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, USB, etc). Of course it has a full QWERTY keyboard with touch-screen and uses a standard stereo jack (this is big advantage and seems to be a standard feature for Sony Ericsson products). However the price seems to be a little too steep. I still can’t see real return-on-investment in buying a phone from this category. You could argue that it brings the functionality of a netbook, a digital camera, a media player and phone in one, but I still feel that it doesn’t do at least an average job of all of them (I imagine that it is a little too small for a netbook replacement and it doesn’t have optical zoom on the photography side – of course no consumer phone does – which makes the quality of the photos too low, even for an amateur like myself).

Full disclosure: this is a paid review from ReviewMe. Under the terms of the understanding I was not obligated to skew my viewpoint in any way (ie. only post positive facts).