Monthly Archives: October 2009

By admin
20th October 2009.
15:50

Some Feedback From Caroline And Sandeep

So our test pilots have been up and running for quite a while now and we have all got to see their pics and videos shot with Satio and read about their experiences on their blogs and in their comments here. They have experienced some issues with their phones, as expected from pre-release SW of course but seems to have coped with it in general and liked their experience. A while ago I sent them some questions to sum up their experience, here’s what they answered:

Caroline:

What are your thoughts on the social media features and possibilities in the Satio?

The Satio is a great piece of kit to get involved in social media. Of course there is the internet browser which can be used for all the standard sites (and with full page versions as well) this is great to use …

I have been looking for a decent twitter app for the phone (as I find the web one a little lacking) and have been recommended one (Gravity) which I will try and report back)

The phone also comes with some great little direct update apps – to Flickr and Youtube included which makes it easy to do those spontaneous updates if you are out and about. This phone will be invaluable for on-the-spot reporting and tweeting from events … especially as the keyboard is so intuitive and the video and camera so good.

What 3rd party software have you installed?

I have not explored 3rd party apps much as (to be honest) I wasn’t sure which ones to install (in terms of phone type – the downside of test piloting a new phone I guess .. none of the sites are geared up for it yet )

I will be looking out for a Twitter app tho … and other apps to help me interact with various social media websites … It already has Google Maps (an app I added on my last phone) so no need to do that … and with the built in uploading to FLickr and Youtube that is sorted too …

How do you use the five start panels?

I must confess I have only just stated using the Favourites panels …so now I have a few names in there of the people I call the most (although could there be a way to search for people to add to favourites instead of having to scroll down to find them?) .. whilst in the Link favouites I have twitter, facebook, my wordpress account and myspace (although I don’t use this screen very often as I browse from one to another once I am inside the browser itself). My phone is on the middle option (the desktop image) the most.

The other tab I use the most is the media one – it is a great way to quickly get to the images quickly … great for showing people that hilarious image etc

I don’t really use the fifth button (recently used I’m guessing?) …. but Ill start remembering its there now

What surprised you the most with the Satio?

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy to use the full screen qwerty keyboard was (this was the one thing that almost put me off the Satio when I saw it online). It is much more reactive than I imagined and is very forgiving of misplaced fingers.

I was also pleased with the colours of the screen – yes it looked impressive on the adverts and photos, but it really is a stunning OS

The camera is phenomenal – better than I could have imagined  – the colours are vivid and the image is bright  … excellent

I was also surprised with the weight of the phone -I expected it to be a lot heavier that it was .. I knew it was a fairly sized handset but it is surrisingly light (which is good :-0)

Making calls on the it is great too – and I was pleased with the sound quality (living in a noisy city you can’t often hear the person you are talking too if outside) but this is crystal clear.

All in all = lots of pleasant surprises – generally at how the phone has exceeded expectations in terms of quality

Sandeep:

What are your thoughts on the social media features and possibilities in the Satio?

I’m quite happy with roadsync and the way it pushes my office mail. I do wish that it supported multiple email accounts though as I wanted to sync my Gmail account through it too.
The Facebook link is quite optimized for touch use and has nice transitions when you move from section to section, but I do miss a push-oriented desktop widget like on the A200 phones or the Facebook panel on the X1. Hopefully, something on these lines would be up on PlayNow Arena when the Satio is out on retail channels. Speaking of PlayNow, I hope to see tonnes of apps, media etc. available for the Satio on the portal so that future customers can expand the functionality of their phone without going through a dozen forums.

The facility to upload pictures directly to an image hosting service is quite nice too and I can see a lot of people using it. Now if only Picasa would improve their JPEG compression algorithm!

What 3rd party software have you installed?

As of now, I have the following:

Opera mini – Nice interface and fast, but makes too many javascript errors.
Gmail app – useless on touchscreen phones. looks like it was designed for normal phones
Fring – Tremendously useful, can connect to multiple IM accounts, Facebook etc. simultaniously. Yet to test out its VOIP functionality though.
Symabook – A free Facebook client that I installed to test it out. The interface looks neat, but it’s still in development, so lacks a lot of functionality.

I tried to look for an Antivirus for the Satio, but no one has a version ready for it yet.

How do you use the five start panels?

The favorite contacts panel is very useful for me as I call/text or mail pretty much the same set of people all the time. I have a Wikipedia link on the bookmarks panel which i use a lot for finding useless info on random stuff, haha. The facebook link gets used a lot too. The main panel of course, is the most important one. The music widget is extremely useful and I use my own wallpapers here all the time. The photo panel is used a lot as I constantly review the pictures I took and decide which ones to post/ process. The flick scrolling action here is extremely smooth, even though i have a few hundred pictures in the phone by now. The apps panel gets used whenever I need to switch on Bluetooth and use the WiFi wizard, calendar or calculator (several times a day).

What surprised you the most with the Satio?

That the red (Bordeaux) looks a lot nicer in the newer videos than I expected it to be, haha. With my Satio though, the thing that surprised me the most was the solid feel that the handset posessed. It’s not as heavy as an X1, but it’s very sturdy and the panel gaps are millimeter perfect. Certainly a well built handset and Kudos to SE for that.