We prefer calling it Idou but since Sony Ericsson insists, yeah, we played with the Satio. While the 12.0 MP monster camphone is still quite a few months away from hitting shelves, we were quite excited when given the chance to lay our dirty paws on Sony Ericsson’s flagship product for 2009.

While the play session lasted for less than an hour and the device being an early prototype, we were left quite impressed by the build quality and the way it felt to hold. Considering it runs on Symbian S60 fifth edition platform, we feel that the Idou will be a good blend of multimedia and smartphone features.

Since we were not allowed to touch the Idou in Barcelona, where it was globally unveiled earlier this year, we were a bit surprised to find that it was quite a big device. It feels quite thick and the bulge on the back to accomodate the active camera lens cover adds to the overall girth. However, it ain’t that big that it’d struggle to slip into your hipster pockets, The entire package looks sturdy enough to survive a nasty fall or two.

What really caught our fancy was its touchscreen. Even though the device is still being developed, the touchscreen was super responsive and we never had to tap the screen too hard to register a response. A feather touch was good enough to do the trick. This, we feel, is quite crucial for any touchscreen-only phone and Sony Ericsson has hit the bull’s-eye in this case. We are told that more tweaks are going on and it would be much more refined by the time it is commercially available!

Sony Ericsson is still working on the user interface or so we have learnt. Currently, there are these five icons on the top for different functionalities. One has to hit the middle button (between the send and end keys) to enter the main menu, which closely resembles like the one found on the Nokia 5800 XM. In other words, devices running on the Symbian Foundation OS will have a different skin but will eventually have the same menu items once one goes beneath the skin.

While we can’t talk about all the functionalities just yet, we’d like to mention one unusual thing we saw in the messaging window. When we went inside the compose message menu, there was an icon on the top right corner of the onscreen QWERTY keyboard that enabled us to move the keyboard around on the screen. Now, what could that be for?