Sony Ericsson Says Goodbye Idou, Hello Satio

Idou, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night. Sony Ericsson’s highly anticipated Idou has been renamed the Satio, which is a total mistake. Why build so much hype with one name and change it to another? Not the smartest marketing move we’ve seen here at Sony Insider, but when you get past this error the details of this phone are incredible. The most attractive thing about the Wifi-equipped Satio is the screen – a true 16:9 display on a 3.5 inch widescreen (640×360) with 16 million colors!

Three colors will be available, and Sony Ericsson surprised me here by not having overly crazy names for each – expect the touch screen Satio in black, silver and Bordeaux. Electricpig.co.uk has a nice hands on with the Satio.

The camera included with the Satio is equally incredible at 12.1 megapixels and 12x digital zoom. Auto focus, face detection and geo-tagging with the built-in GPS are included. Image stabilization should guarantee that when you’re trying to take pictures of friends, it doesn’t take multiple tries to get the right shot. Other interesting features include red-eye reduction, smile detection and Xenon flash. We found the ability to touch focus very interesting – which basically means when you are taking a picture, you can touch on the screen what you want to be in focus.

What’s unusual here is Sony Ericsson’s adoption of the Micro SD format for Satio, and the inclusion of a 8GB Micro SD card to compliment the 128mb of built-in memory. Very nice – adopting open standards is pretty much the only path to success at this point.

Music features include FM radio (with RDS), and A2DP stereo Bluetooth. Further downloadable music content will be available through PlayNow. Interesting software offerings include HD and 3D games, Facebook, Youtube, Google Maps and turn by turn navigation. The press release also mentions document readers and editors, which is probably hazy wording that the Satio can view and edit Microsoft office files.

We applaud Sony Ericsson for not including the NetFront web browser in the Satio and using the much better Webkit software. We really hope that all Sony devices drop NetFront and embrace the Webkit web browser, as it is a superior experience in just about every single way possible.

Sony Ericsson did NOT include battery life figures with the Satio press release, which we found rather unusual.