Sony Ericsson Aino Review

Sony Ericcson introduced a new innovative phone named Aino. Good looking Aino is seen as good multimedia phone. It includes enhanced features like excellent connectivity, a good 8 megapixel camera, good navigation, huge storage capacity, the ability to remotely access PlayStation 3; 3″ touch screen, Opera Mini browser and simple-but-snappy touch media menu. But the features are not organized properly and occasionally nonsensical.

Design

The Aino gives the impression full touch device. The relative slimness and smooth simplistic front do make the slide-out keyboard quite unexpected. It measures about 104 x 50 x 15.5 mm and weighs 134 grams. The Aino appeals to be solid and gives sturdy feel in hand with nice grip. the Aino comes with large 3-inch,TFT capacitive touchscreen with 16:9 aspect ratio; offers resolution of 240 x 432 pixels and supports 16M colours. The sunlight legibility is quiet good. Built-in Accelerometer sensor enables auto rotation of the screen to landscape or portrait positions. It also features desktop docking station feature.

Unfortunately its touchscreen abilities are restricted to few applications. The Aino functions as a normal non-touch phone when the slider is open. The new media menu is accessible only when the keypad is closed. This touch menu lets you to access to multimedia features such as video, gallery, music, and FM radio. Touch screen feature does not support surfing the web or emailing; you have to manage with the D-pad provided on Querty keyboard. The touch screen responsiveness is very good with smooth sliding action. Icons looks great and but poor User interface shatters everything. We can’t filter the songs based on Genre, Artist or a category; it is bit rigid and resistive. There are some technical snags like, the controls get duplicated all over video screen and less informative screen i.e. unclear where you should touch to accomplish some task.The Aino has got quiet Querty good keypad with usual keys. Call and End may appear too little to hit, but manageable.

The volume rocker and camera buttons are present on right side of the mobile. Sony’s own FastPort is present on the left. The Loudspeaker and Microphone pinhole are provided at the bottom. Speakers offer good volume range with clean clarity. The headset and the desk stand are great and they mean more bang for your head. The lock key has been provided at top, used to lock/unlock the touchscreen. While uncovered Camera and 2 LEDs Flash are present the back. The microSD slot is provided under the battery cover, you have to remove rear panel and battery to insert it every time. It has internal memory of 55MB and huge 8GB external memory (extendible up to 32GB).

Features Galore

The Aino has lot of features but its user interface has not been designed to manage them well. Like, the calendar logo appears for organizer app and some other logo for calendar.

The Aino has 14 more options including file transfer features, a file constituting apps which we have downloaded from Sony Ericsson’s app store.

Remote Controller for Playstation3

The Aino facilitates the remote accessing of Playstation3. To achieve this, you have to register with Ps3 and you have to stream audio and video over Wi-Fi or 3G.  It may appeals to be stunning, but ironically you can’t play games on PS3 , you can only turn on/off the PS3. You need to do lot of settings to accomplish this to happen.

Multimedia: It comes with a latest multimedia player  named Walkman player 4.0 which supports almost all audio formats like MP3,WAV,eAAC+ and as well as MP4/ /H.263 video formats. Video player doesn’t support the DixX/XviD formats and TV. It offers FM radio with RDS feature and trackID. The audio and video clarity is at it best. The best is that The Aino also comes with a Bluetooth headphone adaptor, with a hands-free microphone. The synchronization and media library updating are sluggish. The new media menu is accessible only when the keypad is closed. It consists of five icons – camera, gallery, music, video and FM radio.

Connectivity: it supports Quad band GSM, GPRS, Wi-fi, WLAN with DLNA, 3G bands (HSDPA, HSUPA), USB, and Bluetooth with A2DP support for wireless audio streaming in to headsets. No infra-red support. It has good GPS feature with A-GPS support and preloaded with WisePilot satnav app and google maps; MAP navigation will not be any problem. It is preloaded with 2 motion based games and if u wants you can download more java games. It has faster Opera mini web browser supports WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML (NetFront 3.5), and has RSS reader feature as well. It also comes with built-in social network apps like Youtube, BBC iPlayer & Facebook applications.

Camera: The Aino is equipped with excellent 8.1 megapixel camera having good resolution of 3264×2448 pixels, which captures pictures with great quality but not as good as the pictures taken on Digital camera. It features advanced camera features like Autofocus, Geo-tagging, face-smile detection, image stabilization, manual focus. You can shoot the video at the rate of 30 frames per second; Video clarity is not so good. It has 2 LED flashes, which lets you to capture pictures in dark as well.

Battery: Aino has Lithium-Po (1000 mAh) powered battery. It offers good battery life Up to 8.5hours talktime, 31 hour on music play and Up to 300 hours on stand by.

Final world

The Aino comes with innovative features like Remote Controller for Playstation3, Desktop docking, 8 MP camera, FM radio, Opera mini browser. It fails with its confusing touchscreen application, poor user interface; may not match up with its rival phones. It comes at a price of 390 pounds or Rs. 22700.

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