Sony Ericsson Aino

SHAYNE RANA | 24 February 2010

For : Innovative design, great battery life, bundled 8 GB microSD card.

Against : GPS apps need A-GPS support, low volume.

Sony Ericsson Aino Verdict: A feature-rich handset with room for improvement. If you’re wondering what the name Aino means, your guess is as good as ours. It translatestin to different things in different languages. In Finnish it can be a person’s name that means ‘The Only One’, in Japanese it’s the native name of ‘Man’ and a race of people that came before the earliest Japanese settlers. The handset is obviously neither. Sony Ericsson has stepped out of its usual pattern of using model numbers for mobile handsets and gone with just a name. As unique as the name may be, we were curious to see how unique the handset would turn out and here’s our experience. The Aino is is a well crafted handset. It’s well balanced and very streamlined and the weight, although a little on the heavy side, gives the handset a definite feel good factor. The pop slider is very smooth and can be opened or closed with a simple flick. Volume/Zoom keys are on the same side as the shutter release for the handset’s 8 MP camera (with LED flash). Sony’s proprietary USB slot is located on the other side. Sadly they didn’t think it important to have a 3.5 mm socket; instead the Aino comes with a Bluetooth receiver that can be hooked up to a wired set of earphones. The Aino comes with the new chargers that have a secondary proprietary port built in so one could use a wired headset while charging (though one isn’t included with the phone). The Bluetooth adapter for the wireless headset can only be charged when it’s placed in the bundled cradle, which means you’ll have to lug that extra piece of hardware around wherever you go. The Aino uses microSD cards to increase its memory capacity and comes with an 8 GB card. The slot is unfortunately located under the rear panel, but thankfully it's quite easy to pop open. The 3-inch display’s touch functionality can be accessed only in landscape mode for media. The resolution is 240 x 432 with 16 million colors, but for some strange reason, we noticed the resolution seemed a little askew in the media mode in terms of overall clarity. Sony Ericsson’s UI has, sadly, remained unchanged. It’s always been colorful and very animated, but this becomes a burden on the battery. We found a little bit of lag in the Aino’s UI even when we selected the least animated theme. Refreshing new data in the media section was also a bit slow. But on the brighter side, the touchscreen media UI was responsive and well laid out thus making it very user friendly. While the handset does have an accelerometer to rotate web pages and the media gallery, there’s no virtual keyboard. You’ll have to struggle to use the alphanumeric keypad in portrait mode. And there’s your disadvantage right there, since the browser for some reason can’t be accessed from the touch sensitive media menu. We were very disappointed with the audio functionality that the Aino brings to the table. While the quality of playback is not in question the decibel level is just too low. Without a decently high volume level you’ll never be able to enjoy your audio with the Aino. The Bluetooth tether for the handsfree is also a little large with a rather ‘disco-inspired’ indicator system. Sony Ericsson has included quite a few attractive visualizations to the player and of course EQ presets with a customizable option which do make a difference to the quality, while the volume still remains low. The FM radio worked well enough and managed to scan and store all the available stations tuned in record time. Reception was decent in most places but not too great in a moving train. A voice recorder is also on board. SE’s TrackID and access to the PlayNow section for downloading content are available as well. Since the phone doesn’t support DivX or XviD files natively, you’ll have to spend a little time converting videos to 3GP or MPEG4. The videos that did convert were easy to watch on the 3-inch display. The Aino is a very active handset in the connectivity department. The built-in Wi-Fi offers access to your PS3 for media streaming, but that’s not really a very big deal as you can access just that console and no other device at all. Thanks to Sony Ericsson’s MediaGo PC software you can wirelessly transfer data on the PC to the handset. We recommend doing this while the handset is charging as Wi-Fi does tend to suck the life out of it quite fast. Other connectivity options include 3G, EDGE/GPRS and Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP. A Facebook application is provided for the social networker in you to quickly access and update your status, check up friend’s activities et al. The YouTube application allows you to stream videos from the site in an easy-to-use mobile-friendly UI. You can also configure your Picasa and Flickr accounts quite easily to upload images. And of course POP and IMAP email accounts can also be quickly set up. Another disappointment we found is that the handset, although equipped with a GPS module, only comes with apps like Wisepilot and Google Maps that are primarily A-GPS enabled so quite pointless if you have no reception. This could have been better thought out. The onboard 8-megapixel camera is equipped with touch focus which didn’t work out as well as the Satio’s as it was unresponsive and pretty much focused on only what it wanted. It has a few scene modes included and a self timer as well. The image quality was not bad at all. In fact outdoor images looked quite crisp. Images without the flash in low light conditions didn’t turn out too well, but on the whole the camera is definitely one of the better features of the Aino. As long as you’re not always logged in to Facebook and you’ve done away with the unnecessary animations in the themes, the battery life is really good. Talk time alone averaged in at over 5 hours in our testing, which was a very pleasant surprise. With normal usage you should get well over 2 days of usage before you’ll need to charge it. The price tag on the Aino is Rs 28,950 which may seem a little steep considering SE has the W995—a far superior 8-megapixel camera handset—which costs a lot less on the market. The MediaGo and PS3 connectivity is not enough to justify the additional cost even if this is a better looking handset and offers slightly better battery life. Then again the W995 doesn’t have a touchscreen but it does have much better audio output. So if you’re looking for a sleek handset with great battery life and a high resolution camera with plenty of connectivity, the Aino is just one of the many choices out there. However, it’s a good idea to wait till the price drops. Specifications Rs 28,950 www.sonyericsson.com Dimensions (WxHxD): 50 x 104 x 15.5 mm; Weight: 134 g; Display: 3-inch capacitive touchscreen, 240x432 pixels; Memory: 55 MB; Connectivity: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; Camera: 8.1 MP auto-focus; Rated battery life: 13 hours. Contact Sony Ericsson Phone 1800-11-1800