Sony Ericsson Satio review

The contacts menu on the Sony Ericsson Satio is arranged in the standard list format most people are used to on their phone, and have mostly managed to get used to on a touchscreen.

However, the problem with scrolling on the S60 5th edition is there's no dynamic control on the list, meaning if you flick down the list doesn't fly past as you'd expect it to (and the way it does on the iPhone and Android handsets).

In fact, it goes the opposite way, meaning you have to either hold your finger down to scroll through (which is highly inaccurate in practice) or use the scrollbar at the side, which is equally difficult to perfect.

The best way of finding the right contact is to simply type the name in the bottom – it might take a little while for the dialogue box to come up, but the phone cleverly lets you only type in letters relevant to the person's name, making it easier to locate the contact you're after.

Each name has the usual stuff you can assign to it, and SO much more. You can obviously do pictures, ringtones, mobile number and name. So far, so standard.

But then you can add a fax number and email address. A company name. An assistant's number. The assistant's name. Even a carphone number.

You can also set up groups of contacts if you're into that sort of thing, allowing you to send messages or call a group when trying to set up a meeting. If you're the captain of some sort of team this function is invaluable, if you're not – then you probably won't use it.

At least calling is a simpler process, with video and voice calling all in the box and easy to access. You can either highlight a name and simply press the call key to get things going, or select video call from the menu.

We actually like video calling on the Sony Ericsson Satio, as it allows you to do a lot of things with it. For instance, you can use the front VGA camera or the rear 12MP effort to show off your video, although the latter does lag somewhat.

You can also share a picture from your gallery as your video image, making things a lot more palatable if you've just climbed out of bed to take the call.

However, while signal was generally very good, call quality was apparently not. Despite having full bars on a number of occasions, we had people telling us we were cutting out a lot, with one remarking it was 'like speaking to us over a very low bandwidth connection'.

Calls coming in sounded great, but if the person on the other end can't hear you well enough, then calling becomes something of a problem. It mainly happened over 3G, but given the need for data connection for many applications we were loathe to switch it off.

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