Two phones have gone under our noses recently, both of which raised more than a little wrinkled of, if not quite disgust, then certainly a little annoyance. First up was the Samsung Pixon 12, with it’s from-the-rooftops shouting about its having, well, 12 megapixels onboard. So what! we shouted back, you’re still not a camera, never will be, so there. Then we had the Aino, from Sony Ericsson. Which, while impressive in many respects, was pretty much a daft buy unless you owned a PS3. So, what about the Sony Ericsson Satio? Does it claim to be something it’s not? Nope. Does it pander to a small and smug portion of the population exclusively? Not a bit of it.

So, what does it do, and how does it do them? Well, the short answer is: a lot of things, very well. (Read this Sony Ericsson Satio review for the long answer!). That’s because the Satio is very cleverly being positioned as a phone that excels at ‘visual communication.’ A-ha! you say, I like watching videos on the way to work, therefore this phone is definitely for me. Or, wahoo! you scream, I like surfing the internet and using things like Flash while I’m doing so, this will be exactly what I need.

And that’s where Sony Ericssion have got it so right with the Sony Ericsson Satio. Because, to look at the thing (have a peek at the video below) you’d be very much forgiven for thinking, oh, it looks just like a camera, it must be primarily a cameraphone. And with the pretty damn good camera onboard, it is a fantastic cameraphone. But it is also a fantastic music player, video recorder, email checker, media downloader and… well, it does just about everything it attempts more or less spot on. So we’re all for the Sony Ericsson Satio, and we have a sneaking suspicion you will be too.

Yawn…. Another handset trying to grab market share by adding a better camera. I don’t know if it’s just me, but bolting on more megapixels onto an old model doesn’t really do it for me. Yet that is exactly what Samsung have done with their “all new” Samsung Pixon 12. It seems that in a bid to increase market share, Samsung is releasing the Sony Ericsson Satio which is expected to be released later this year. Overall both handsets promise to offer great image quality, but is there really much more room for increased pixel quality images on your mobile phone. I feel that we should now be looking beyond purely just megapixels. We should be looking at optical zoom, new filters, better flash quality and more besides. 12 megapixels is great, but without a high quality lens, you will not see a marked difference image quality. I have mentioned before in other posts that we may not be far off a truly universal device that will allow users to leave their digital camera at home and just take a phone out with them. However if handset manufacturers are determined to simply increase the resolution on their handsets and not offer other features, it may take us a little longer to achieve this. So can we say that 12 megapixels is going to be the highest spec? I very much doubt it!