The Satio "what Were They Thinking" Thread, Bugs/inconsistencies/omissions from the firmware Options

[muf]

Hello again!

Having recently upgraded from my k800i (which was modded to hell and back) to a Satio, there are a couple of things that seem strange or lacking in the launch firmware. If anything else springs to mind, feel free to post it in this thread.

• No equaliser / stereo widening / Mega Bass
  I actually searched the interface for like a full 15 minutes trying to find this functionality, convinced it must be there. This is something I take for granted, yet the Satio doesn't have it!
• Play button doesn't double as a play/pause button during music playback
  This is another thing I assumed would work. On the side of the handset, there is a ▸ button, which you can press to bring up your photo album. When playing music, when the touch screen is locked, there is no way (that is if you have a HPM-70 handsfree) to quickly pause music without taking the whole handset out of your pocket, unlocking the screen, and pressing pause. A simple solution would have been to allow the play button to double as a music play/pause when in keylock.
• "Set as wallpaper" does not use the tilt value embedded in a photo
  The Satio has a neat built-in accelerometer that knows when you take a photo in portrait or landscape. This gets embedded in the JPEG file as metadata, and you can see it when you browse through your photos, they're always the right side up regardless of your current phone orientation. But when you set a photo as wallpaper, it gets used as if it were taken in landscape, and the rest cropped out, resulting in a very strange looking wallpaper. The solution is to open the photo in PhotoDJ and rotate it manually, which causes it to be displayed the wrong way in the photo gallery. Which brings me to my next point:
• PhotoDJ has extremely limited functionality compared to earlier cameraphones
  Okay, so we have a 12 megapixel camera now. Neat. But what if the lighting is off, or there's some effect we want to add and we're at the pub or something, and we don't have a computer with Photoshop nearby to edit it. Solution! Bluetooth the file to your old k800i or k850i and edit it in PhotoDJ, and transfer it back!
• Photo gallery is inconsistent
  There are two ways to view your photos. Using the Entertainment Unlimited media gallery, or by pressing the ▸ on the side, which takes you to the Cybershot gallery. But these two are completely separate and different apps! A notable difference is that the EU gallery has a slow responding zoom, and the CS gallery has a smooth zoom animation. Also, when you can't zoom any further, the EU gallery gives you an obnoxious notice that you have to press "OK" on, which is handled much more intuitively in the CS gallery. Speaking of zooming:
• No easy way to crop photos for use as wallpaper
  This is something I really liked about the old Cybershot phones. You could zoom in the photo gallery, and then save the current crop-out to a new file, and set it as your wallpaper! No such functionality in the Satio. I have to bluetooth it to my laptop and crop it in Photoshop.
  
  And a final, minor point:
• No easy way to use the phone as a pocket watch
  When the backlight turns off, the whole screen turns black, and there is no standby clock. Also, there's no way to make the active standby clock bigger. To make matters worse, the active standby clock takes about a second to update after waking up from keylock.

Another interesting list - Missing apps:

• Facebook
  It was promised in the feature list, it's in the TV adverts, but it's nowhere to be found on the phone. Solution: get a developer certificate and install Nokia's Facebook app for N97 and 5800XM
• Egg Timer
  As I put a pizza into the oven just now I wanted to set a timer, but... Wait, hang on? Where's the timer?
• Stopwatch
  As this list gets more ridiculous, we have alarms, a calculator, a unit converter, but no stopwatch.

That's all for now! I hope SEMC is reading this.

This post has been edited by muf: 2009-11-07 19:20

[pidgiano]

good observations i agree with you totally, the satio has lots of potential but its been rushed out. I'm with Vodafone and they're past masters at screwing up quality phones.

[muf]

good observations i agree with you totally, the satio has lots of potential but its been rushed out. I'm with Vodafone and they're past masters at screwing up quality phones.

Yeah I'm with Vodafone too now. That's why I made sure to get an unbranded simlock free phone, even if it comes at a slight premium.

[pidgiano]

i use a storm too but find the browser much nicer on the satio. Overall the satio is a great piece of kit , camera is obviously very good but theres also lots of nice subtle touches which make it very swish. Just need the rough edges smoothing it. I read the O2 forums about the satio and it gets lots of favourable comments and is drawing many iphone users to it . The vodafone forum is pretty much all grumbles and moans though, part justified as Vodafone have really balls upped the app store

[mattft86]

this is strange a few people on this forum have got the satio me being one of them they have said they got the HPM-70 handsfree. the only reson i think this is strange as me and my mum have this phone and they both came with the hpm-77 handsfree



this is my handsfree
http://forums.se-nse.net/products/stereo-h...s-110140/HPM-77

This post has been edited by mattft86: 2009-11-07 20:48

[muf]

I really like the Satio so far as well, I like the camera especially, but that's not what I created this thread for.

When I referred to the HPM-70, that's what I bought in 2006 for my k800i, the headset that came in the box with my Satio is an extremely shitty fixed wire (so no 3.5mm jack) earplug headset (pictured here) that I can't even find on the SEMC website. That's what's in the box for unbranded EUROPE_2 phones, other regions and branded phones may be packaged with a different headset. To be honest I'm not bothered myself about the shitty headset, what does bother me is that there's no way to play/pause unless you get a HPM-82 with a play/pause button on the headset itself.

This post has been edited by muf: 2009-11-07 21:47