The hardware sees you get a 4-inch touchscreen display that dominates proceedings. Beneath this there are three additional buttons that allow you to access menus, the home screen, and skip back a step, and in between this there is even two white tiny LEDs that give you notifications as to what is going on although you will no doubt loose track over time. A dedicated camera button and volume controls pepper the side.

For the Droid or G1 fans out there, there is no slide-out keyboard. Get over it.

Around the back you’ll get an 8.1-megapixel digital camera top centre and beneath that a flash – something not present on the HTC Hero or Apple iPhone.

Although impressive, specs are nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not for your top-of-the-range model and that means you get virtually every tech acronym you can think of including HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DLNA, A-GPS, 3.5mm jack and Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Storage is provided by an 8GB microSD card in the box and connects to your computer/charger via Micro-USB on the top. Unfortunately we weren’t able to confirm what the storage allocation for applications is, but let’s hope it is more than 256MB as with the Motorola Droid.

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It is large, comparable to the Apple iPhone, but not as big as the HTC HD2. Underneath all that User Experience you get Android 1.6. Sony Ericsson are currently sending out mixed messages as to whether or not the handset will sport Android 2.0 when it eventually launches in February, with some spokespeople for the company saying it will and others not so sure.

What this means is that you will miss out on some features, like the ability to search the contents of your phone at the press of a button and Google Maps Navigation (US only). With a strong integrated interface in the guise of what Sony Ericsson is calling Nexus, you get, like the Sense UI from HTC, a lot more friendly functionality than Google offers as standard.

Of course you do get that “standard” approach. The Nexus UX Platform sits on top of Android 1.6 meaning you can run all the standard Android apps as well as apps designed for the phone and UX. Unlike Motorola and HTC, both of whom have also decided to customise the Android experience, Sony Ericsson is hoping for further development by releasing a WebSDK.

The move means that developers will be able to develop applications specifically for Sony Ericsson handsets (the X10 is the first of many) that work only for Sony Ericsson. It’s a brave move and one that will be interesting to watch. As a developer are you really going to be bothered to develop an app for an as yet unproven smartphone when you’ve got Apple, Android, Palm’s WebOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Samsung’s Bada and BlackBerry to develop for as well?

Either way in reality it seems that Sony Ericsson are playing the “you can play with us too” card and regardless of this forging on with their own apps to impress and improve on the Android OS.

In steps Timescape and Mediascape. Timescape is a communications app, which aggregates email, Facebook, Twitter, IM, and SMS into one big lifestream that you can navigate through. Each “event” is represented by a tile, which you can tap to view in more detail, or long-press to get a preview of. The experience is very “Aero” from Windows Vista and in practice not the easiest thing to read.

Each tile has a button marked with an “oo” infinity symbol. Hitting that will take you to related content – which could be content from the person in question, or it could be web content related to whatever is on the tile. It’s a bit like HTC’s contacts feature that shows you all the contact you’ve had with that person, however it’s no Xobni. The list can be filtered by medium, and you can reply to individual messages within the application.

Mediascape is the other “signature” application. It’s built around music, video and images and organises all three on your device. It incorporates players for all three, too, and can hook into various bits of online content. YouTube was named explicitly, but we’d expect Last.fm and perhaps Flickr to show up here too with talk of Spotify being banded around at our briefing (something that might be harder to do than Sony Ericsson realizes thanks to Spotify’s poor API).

Items in Mediascape also have an infinity button and pressing this will again summon related content. For a band, that could be songs on your device, YouTube videos, or even other artists that are similar to whatever you’re listening to. The overlaid controls of this section looked quite similar to the Zune HD’s UI, though that’s only a good thing.

Then there is the image viewer in Mediascape that supports facial recognition. What this means is that you can tag up to five people in a photo and then the handset will attempt to identify those people in other images too – the more you tag, the more accurate it is, very much like Apple’s face recognition feature in iPhoto. The feature can also hook in with your contacts list – you can tap a person in a photo to call them, for instance, however won’t talk to Facebook or Flickr.

Those apps, and others for the Nexus UX, will be available from the PlayNow store.

Elsewhere and it’s pretty standard Android fare for the handset. The software is, and acts, as you would expect for an Android 1.6 handset, however for some reason, one that continues to baffle us, is no multi-touch support. With a touchscreen so large with no keyboard we think it’s a catastrophic move, but then hey, what do we know?

As for performance? Well it’s a little too early to say. The models we looked at both in London and New York have all been pre-production, and early builds at that. It certainly wasn’t as zippy as we would have hoped, certainly for a device with a Snapdragon chipset, but then its too early to tell whether this is just because it’s early code, or because Sony Ericsson has baked in so many graphical, almost PS3-like niceties, that it’s buckled under the weight. We expect it’s the former.

Stock Expected week commencing 1st March 2010 

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The Sony Ericsson Vivaz mobile phone is here to deliver high performance, responsive touch control, multimedia, entertainment and connectivity just how you want it.

Open the window to your mobile world with a stunning 3.2 inch TFT touchscreen, with a huge 720MHz processor powering everything you do.  Don’t let the moments fade with the impressive 8.0-megapixel camera with everything from Touch focus, to smile detection and image stabilisation.  Get connected wherever you are with Wi-Fi, ultra fast 3G HSDPA, Push email and Bluetooth. The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is ready to deliver and go beyond your expectations of a mobile phone!

• Incredible control and navigation with a stunning 3.2 inch touchscreen

• Get more out of your mobile with the Vivaz’ powerful 720MHz processor

• Capture premium quality picture’s with the 8.0-megapixel camera with amazing Touch Focus feature

• Browse the internet at broadband speeds with Wi-Fi connectivity

• When Wi-Fi is unavailable, access lightening fast HSDPA 3G internet

• Receive real time notifications with Push email

Key Features

Camera Features

Music Features

Standard Features

Connectivity

Display & User Interface

Applications

Memory

Messages

Technical

Summary:

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The Sony Ericsson Satio has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster ride. Released just in time for Christmas 2009, the initial batch was so appallingly bad that it was withdrawn from sale by all of the main UK retailers. Sony Ericsson worked hard to fix the bugs, and it seems that the latest version does what it says on the tin. We’ve modified our review to reflect the ups and downs of the Satio, but we’re now confident that the phone works.

Sony Ericsson have been slow on the touchscreen front, dipping their toe in gently with the Xperia X1 and some limited touchscreen functionality on other phones. Meanwhile the rest of the world has charged down the touchscreen road at breakneck speed. Sony are now playing catch up with the release of the Aino (still only partially touchscreen) and the Satio. Still, they’ve gone in all guns blazing with the Satio – not only is it a full touchscreen media phone, but it runs the Symbian operating system and has a 12 megapixel camera and just about every feature that you could think of putting into a mobile phone.

The Satio is a fantastic phone to look at. A bit plasticky perhaps, but solidly built with a good weighty feel. It’s narrower than an iPhone and slimmer than an N97, and is a good size to hold. The widescreen display is a good size too, measuring 3.5 inches diagonally. That’s the same size as the iPhone, but with more pixels, so no complaints there. The touchscreen feels reasonably responsive, despite being of resistive type (unlike the iPhone’s capacitative touchscreen) but doesn’t have the speed of an iPhone or Samsung Jet. Behind the scenes lies the Symbian operating system, a powerful beast but with sluggish tendencies.

The camera is perhaps the headline feature of the Satio. It’s a 12 megapixel monster with a xenon flash for extra brightness in low lighting. The camera is an outstandingly good one, and the Satio is arguably the best camera phone released to date. It’s packed with features such as touch autofocus and face detection autofocus, as well as smile detection and BestPic, so there’s no excuse for getting an out of focus picture or missing the best shot. We like the way that Sony have integrated touchscreen functionality into the camera interface, making the Satio feel very much like a real Sony digital camera. The Satio isn’t a slouch when it comes to video either, using a LED video light to capture video after dark.

The Satio is an all-rounder, with full music support in addition to the outstanding camera. With a built-in FM radio, plus all the usual Sony gadgets like TrackID and album art, this has the potential to replace your MP3 player, although we’re disappointed to see that once again Sony have missed off a 3.5mm headphone jack, so you’re stuck with the supplied headphones or a Bluetooth headset. We’re also a bit miffed that the memory is limited to 128 MB, which is peanuts for a phone of this calibre. Of course you can use the microSD card slot to store your photos and music, but rival smartphones commonly have gigabytes of memory built in nowadays. I guess that we should be grateful that Sony Ericsson has bowed to pressure and made the Satio microSD compatible, instead of forcing their own proprietary Memory Sticks on us.

The Satio is packed with all kinds of other goodies, such as aGPS with Google Maps, a good web browser with fast HSDPA downloading, email support with Exchange ActiveSync and WiFi support. The battery power is not so great. With a huge TFT screen, GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth in action this shouldn’t be a surprise. Turn off the features that you don’t need to save juice.

So, it should be clear that the Satio is Sony Ericsson’s blockbuster phone. It’s got the lot, and now that the bugs have been fixed, it can rightly take its place as one of the best mobile phones currently available. We’re not giving it 5 stars just yet though. Just in case. One final note: most of the user reviews below were written in the days of the “old” Satio. You can read more recent Sony Ericsson Satio reviews at our partner website, RecommendedBuys UK.

Features of the Sony Ericsson Satio include:

• 12.1 megapixel camera with xenon flash, touch autofocus, face detection, smile detection, 16x digital zoom, BestPic, image stabiliser, geo-tagging, photo fix and red eye reduction
• Video camera with video light / video calling
• Touchscreen display: TFT, 16 million colours, 640 x 360 pixels (3.5 inches) with auto rotation
• Media player with PlayNow and TrackID support
• FM radio
• MP3/AAC ringtones
• Speakerphone
• aGPS with Google Maps
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email with Exchange ActiveSync
• 3D Java games
• Picture wallpaper
• Symbian OS
• Memory: 256 MB RAM plus 128MB flash memory plus microSD memory card
• Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB mass storage, WiFi, modem
• Internet: EDGE, 3G HSDPA, web browser, RSS feeds, YouTube support
• Flight mode
• Vibration alert
• Quadband GSM plus dual band 3G HSDPA
• Size: 112 x 55 x 13 mm
• Weight: 126g
• Talktime: 5 hours (3G) – 11 hours (2G)
• Battery standby: 340 – 360 hours

At just 10.9mm, it’s one of the thinnest phones around – with designer looks to match. And you won’t spoil the effect when you need to play, pause or rewind. Dedicated music keys give you full control without opening the phone. It’s pure simplicity.

The same goes for the 1.3 megapixel camera. Multishot snaps at will – so all you have to do is choose your best close – up.

The Sony S350 is a sleek and stylish Blu-ray player that measures in at just over 2 inches in height. it is backwards compatible with standard DVD disc’s and features 1080p upscaling meaning they’ll look better than ever!

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The W902 Switches seamlessly from music to media to experience crystal clear video capabilities compromise is now a thing of the past! Thats not all your Sony Ericsson has a scratch resistant screen and is coated in a retro-styled case that will impress! Oh did I mention the Geo-tagging facility that allows you to take a photo and will then automatically add the local information to your picture.

• Admire the top of the range Walkman music player – no need for an iPod when you own one of these.
  
• Find out what any song is called with the TrackID music recognition
• Choose your tracks or play songs randomly and create your own playlists
• Listen to the latest tracks with the built-in FM Radio with RDS
• No need to compromise take great pictures with the built-in 5.0-megapixel camera
• Extra protection is what its all about with the scratch resistant screen
• Use ‘Geo tagging for adding automatic local information to pictures

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The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 mobile phone

With a style that speaks of “not-so-innocent intentions” the X1 has features to match! One of the best things about the X1 is that you can customise it to suit your own individual needs! How I hear you ask? Well the huge 3 inch touch-screen display has 9 changeable iconic menu panels each having its own feature behind it which you can easily setup and change according to use! To access a panel you simply touch it and the whole screen fills with the detail requested. Set one panel to launch Google Maps via the turbo 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity! Another could open a world in which you can watch videos or view internet sites delighting your eyes exactly how they on a PC! Select another for Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional which allows for the full use of Power Point Excel and Word all via your Xperia X1! Others could link to listen to your music via the built-in FM Radio or the 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash!.

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Use the built-in Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional for Power Point Excel and Word. . Get super fast internet speeds with 3G HSDPA connectivity.

Access your emails on the go with Wi-Fi connectivity and Outlook. . Be amazed by the QWERTY keyboard and 3 inch wide VGA display. . Identify unknown tracks with the latest TrackID™ technology. Listen to the latest music tracks via the built-in FM Radio.

• Use the stylish touch-screen display to navigate around your phone
  
• Find out information anytime, anywhere with the pre-installed Google search
  
• View your web browser in the HMTL version for maximum visual affect
  
• Capture all your great times with the 5.0-Megapixel camera
  
• Listen to the latest tracks with the built-in FM radio
  
• Share all multimedia files via your Bluetooth™ and messaging

• 600 mins and Unlimited texts. PLUS Unlimited Mobile Internet & Email.
• Chose any gift below.

Sony Ericsson G502 + Free Ipod Nano	Sony Ericsson G502 + Free Nintendo Wii and Guitar Hero	Sony Ericsson G502 + Free 20″ LCD TV
600 mins and Unlimited texts. Half price line rental for first 3 months.	600 mins and Unlimited texts. PLUS Unlimited Mobile Internet & Email.	600 mins and Unlimited texts. PLUS Unlimited Mobile Internet & Email.