Sony Ericsson Satio review

Messaging on the Sony Ericsson Satio is actually well laid out and easy to do, thanks to the refined Symbian S60 system. It simply lists your inbox, sent messages, outbox for pending messages and so on, and it's all easy to work out what's going on.

You can also add in a personal webmail account through the wizard, as well as a corporate Exchange account using the bundled RoadSync software, which instantly pops up in the account list when you install it.

Parsing through messages is a similar experience to looking through contacts – except this time you don't have a search function, so you're best relying on the scrollbar to do what you need.

It's not the most accurate way of doing things, and we really hope that Sony Ericsson decides to follow Nokia's lead and update its phones with dynamic scrolling.

Typing a message is a bit of a hit and miss affair on the Sony Ericsson Satio as well, mostly thanks to the resistive touchscreen in our opinion.

We mostly opted for the full screen version of the keyboard (although the alphanumeric approach was pretty good too especially for one handed operation), and we constantly found ourselves hitting the delete key when we misspelt words.

And curiously, at one point the phone stop registering the haptics touches (where it buzzes under the finger when using the screen) and just carried on letting us type without it. Then the buzzes seemed to remember they were supposed to be there, and all happened at once in a hurry – very odd indeed.

We're very much against the need for handwriting recognition on a mobile phone – we've yet to encounter a system that will let us input more than 30 per cent of the letters we write accurately, so we're not really sure of the point.

You are able to drag the handwriting box around the screen, but ultimately it's not enough for us.

Using email was a little bit easier, especially when it came to the push variety with Roadsync. Emails turned up instantly into our mobile inbox, replying was a doddle and generally it all worked as it should.

Google Mail was a little harder to work out, as the phone couldn't find the relevant settings for automatic installation of our account. This means a long old trip on the internet to find the exact settings to allow forwarding of our Google mail to a mobile account, and inputting these all with painstaking precision.

And you need to keep the messaging window open at all times to receive the email from Google (that's thankfully not the case with Roadsync, but that does need to be open anyway).

The weird thing these both have in common is that you can't drag the screen to move through the message – this just activates the copy and paste functionality. Don't get us wrong, we're all for that, but we'd also like an easy way to move through the message without highlighting everything in sight.

If it seems like we're making a lot of negative comments on the messaging function on the Satio, that's only because the main functions of the phone are blindingly simple – it's just the stuff around the edges that's niggly.

We're not saying you'll struggle to tap out a simple text, because you won't. It's just if you want to extend messaging a bit further and use some of the additional functionality on the high end Satio smartphone you may struggle a bit though.

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