As work has continued on Sony Ericsson's take on S60 5th Edition with the Vivaz, it's not surprising that the Satio has reaped the benefit, inheriting benefits and fixes. Widely panned on release six months ago, the Satio finally delivers on a bit more of its promise with this update, 'R2AK', a 108MB download, which has been dribbling out for some product codes but is right now available using the Sony Ericsson Update Service in Western Europe. Comments, changes, links and more below - though I have to warn you that some of the core bugs and issues remain unresolved.

The Satio, you will remember, had much to recommend it, from the 12 megapixel camera with Xenon flash to that big 3.5" transflective touchscreen. The problems were almost all to do with software and with this update, a number of them (but not all) have been resolved.

The update is available through the Update Service client found at www.sonyericsson.com/update as usual, with a new screen, as shown below, showing automatic preservation of data and contents. This is, I believe, new for Sony Ericsson's S60 5th Edition phones.

Mind you, this firmware is a such a big leap that for any modern smartphone I would have recommended updating/rebuilding from scratch anyway. If, like me, you've been experiencing instability on your Satio with the previous firmware, I recommend taking the install+reset route here, followed by manually syncing/restoring just your data, re-install third party apps from latest versions and go from there.

[NB: there seems to be something of an underground hacking scene for the Satio (e.g. to add support for Nokia-certified software), much as for the Samsung i8910 HD - note that All About Symbian does not condone such hacking and in fact strongly recommends normal users to stay away from such activities - you'll only soak up hours of your time messing around and will almost certainly adversely affect the stability of your shiny new smartphone]

Changelog:

• A number general OS bug fixes and performance improvements
• Still camera quality improvements
• Support for WVGA video recording – this is enhanced to fit the wide screen format and hence resolution is also slightly increased to 864x480 (the preset size will still be VGA, user has to change to get WVGA) - see below for sample
   
  
    
• Upload of pictures to Facebook – you can now upload pictures directly from the picture menu you have on the home screen or from the Media UI
• YouTube video uploading – you can now upload videos to Youtube directly from the Media UI
• Conversational messaging – “Conversations” is now nicely integrated into the messaging menu 
• DLNA support – The new software will support DLNA media server for easy transfer of audio and still pictures. (Note that video is not supported)
• UI improvements – several minor UI improvements have been made, "in order to optimize the user experience".
• The Facebook client for S60 5th Edition is now built-in.

Notable though is that core showstopper bugs (e.g. in predictive text handling and media suite item browsing - where the whole phone can be repeatably given screen corruption and then frozen) remain. In addition, there's a new problem with touchscreen responsiveness, whereby virtual text input is definitely laggier than on the previous firmware and as a result taps get missed. Disappointing, especially as I went down the factory reset route - this was a clean install, etc.

Here's a sample of video from the Satio with R2AK firmware:

Resolution is certainly higher, though the lack of focus or pre-focus really lets it down (in common with the likes of the N97, to be fair). Also, sound levels in captured audio are way too low.

If you've updated your Satio, comments welcome - is R2AK an improvement overall? Does the Satio meet your expectations yet? Noteworthy is that the Vivaz is due here for review today. Let's hope its firmware is more stable and mature.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 9 Mar 2010

PS. (Some of the above info from The Sony Ericsson Update Blog)