Hands on: Sony Ericsson Aino review

UPDATE: We've now published our full Sony Ericsson Aino review.

The Sony Ericsson Aino is a slider phone that had an entire room excited when at release, it claimed to have the ability to playback content directly from your PS3. But alas, it's not the PSP phone; instead you get a very solid and heavily featured phone with the ability to access media anywhere.

While it's never going to win the plaudits of the Sony Ericsson Satio, the Aino (pronounced I-no) is a very nice phone in its own right, and manages to edge above being simply solid into 'impressive' territory.

It doesn't have the new Symbian interface, instead relying on Sony Ericsson's standard UI, which means that feature-wise it's not as rich.

The first thing you notice is the weighty feel of the handset (as well as the startlingly dark hue the Obsidian Black is sporting, with your eyes feeling like they've been sucked into a vortex of mobile phone gravity). It's a reassuring weight, with a button layout that will be familiar to a number of the Sony Ericsson fraternity.

While this phone doesn't have the hidden D-pad that a PSP phone might sneak out to titillate us with, it does have some decent media capabilities that are clearly extended beyond the range of the phone itself as is shown by the location-less Media Go functionality.

What is bizarre is that while the Aino has a touchscreen, it only works in media mode, meaning we wouldn't have known it was there unless we were told. It's easy to imaging a number of people poking their phone normally to no avail and then being perplexed when the touchscreen fires up in media mode.

Anyway, the whole thing was had a nice feeling to it, and watching videos on the included dock was easy thanks to the pleasant angle offered.

Audio was excellent on both music and video with the bundled wireless buds, and you get the feeling that in this phone Sony Ericsson has really had a good think about what it takes to make media on a phone work well. The touchscreen in media mode worked pretty well, perhaps not in the same sensitivity league as the Satio, but still a decent effort nonetheless.

However, it's just as well there are bundled wireless 'buds given there's no 3.5mm jack, which you would have expected on such a media-centric phone. At least you get an 8GB microSD card in the box, which makes up for the teeny 55MB of memory on board.