Sony Ericsson U1 - All In One Truly Multimedia Phone

By Author: Jerry Smith
Total Articles: 225
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Sony Ericsson U1 aka Satio is the first Sony Ericsson phone with Symbian S60 operating system. It is an all in one multimedia mobile phone with an excellent feature set. Entertainment unlimited is the introduction given by Sony Ericsson and the phone matches up with the expectations. The dimensions are 112 x 55 x 13 mm and U1 weighs 126 g. You pay a hefty sum on the Sony Ericsson U1 and it can do everything you want. It is a full fledged touch screen from Sony Ericsson and it has to be admitted that the company has really developed a winner this time.

The design of U1 is truly impressive. A clean front with a large display and neat three buttons fully utilize the real estate provided by the phone. The blinking LED lets you know the status of the events. The built is plastic with a glossy finish, but it looks and feels sturdy. The large 3.5" TFT touch screen with 360 x 640 pixel resolution displays 16.7 million colors. The U1 uses resistive touch technology and you get to use the stylus for the screen to be highly responsive. However the display is a little disappointing when you read it outdoors.

The Symbian ...
... S60 is quite an appealing operating system that makes it easy for any touch screen mobile phone user to use the phone. You can download applications in the Symbian Horizon Store. With a faster and powerful processor, the interface works pretty much faster. Even though the user interface works fine, it lacks style as you would normally expect from such a well built mobile phone. The animated menus and tweaks that were expected with touch screen mobile phone are absent here. The standby application shows five panels that provide quick and easy access to menu items.

The Satio is nearly capable of everything. The PDF viewer lets you read ebooks. Office documents can be viewed and edited by using the QuickOffice application. The MyLook application allows customization of the U1 looks and themes. Worldmate provides lot of information about all places in the world. Google maps is available using which you can find places of your interest. Wisepilot is another interesting GPS application suitable for navigation.

The music player looks cool allowing various types of searching within albums and playlists. You can multitask using U1 by minimizing the music player to the active desktop and work with other applications. You can connect any Sony Ericsson headset for the radio to operate. The Picture viewer is a simple application and the automatic rotating feature of the phone rotates the pictures when you change the orientation of the phone. You can browse videos, podcasts and camera videos using the available video player.

The 12MP camera is a great addition to U1 and it definitely surpasses any moderate digital camera that you can get these days. It has an autofocus CMOS camera and a Xenon flash for still photos and LED flash for recording videos. There is a secondary camera that is highly useful for video calling in 3G networks. The camera features are plenty with scenes, shoot mode, auto mode, white balance, effects, geotag and others, that allow you to take advantage of the 12MP camera. The camera also takes high quality videos that are incomparable at the moment.

The Sony Ericsson U1 supports GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA networks. It is a pure pleasure to browse websites using the available web browser and it displays everything including flash contents. Sending emails and messages is so simple and inviting with the touch sensitive mobile phone. There are a few preloaded games, but more 3D games can be downloaded to exploit the hardware. Standard Li-Po 1000 mAh battery provides standby time of 360 hours for 2G and 340 hours for 3G and talk time of 11 hours for 2G and 4 hours 50 min for 3G networks.
Jerry Smith, the editor of http://www.mobilephoneonly.co.uk. An expert on mobile phone and an observer of UK telecommunication market. He writes reviews on latest mobile phones, and also suggests promotional deals and special offers from mobile phone retailers in UK.