Sony Ericsson Aino review

Sony Ericsson's Aino is proof that the higher you reach the harder you can fall. This phone looked like it had huge potential, but, in the end, just gave us a pain in the Aino. Sporting groovy good looks, it's packed with innovative features, including the ability to remotely control your PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, its huge range of interesting features is poorly organised and occasionally nonsensical.

The Aino is available for free on a £35-a-month contract, or around £390 SIM-free.

Remote controller
Get ready for some heart-breaking news. The Sony Ericsson Aino is not the much-rumoured PSP phone. But it is a phone with a very special relationship with the PS3. Register the phone with your PS3 and you should be able to stream video and audio over Wi-Fi or 3G from anywhere in the world. You can't play games, but you can turn your PS3 on and off, which is pretty cool.

We tried the 'remote play' feature on two different wireless networks, and found that some work is needed to get it up and running. Sony Ericsson has posted  a guide to remote play on its Web site, but it's superficial. It glosses over configuring port-forwarding on your wireless router, which is just as techie as it sounds and something that you may have to do to make the wireless-control feature work.

We were able to test the feature by wirelessly connecting straight to our PS3 without going over the Wi-Fi network. When it works, it's very cool. You can easily navigate around your PS3 on the phone, and watching video, for example, is fun. But, again, don't expect this feature to be easy to set up. We also expect that the results would be poor-quality over the 3G network.

Look, but don't touch
The Aino also separates itself from the phone herd by mixing touchscreen and non-touchscreen interfaces. When this slider phone is open, it's an utterly normal non-touchscreen phone. But, when it's closed, it has a totally different, touch-sensitive user interface. In this mode, it doesn't show most of its plethora of features -- instead, it's a media device that you can touch to view your photos, videos and music.

The touchscreen is fairly responsive, and the icons look good, but the user interface works poorly. For example, you can only select your music by album, not by artist or other category. You can listen to playlists, but you'll have to slide the phone out to change them or add a song. It's a very restrictive system, especially compared to that of a dedicated MP3 player like the Sony Walkman NWZ-S544.

It's also unclear where you should touch to make something happen -- for example, to go back a level. We saw some technical hiccups as well, such as the controls being duplicated all over the video-playing screen.

When you shut the slider, the touchscreen fun ends abruptly. We really missed the touch capability when we had the phone open and were surfing the Web, for instance, since the ability to poke a link can really come in handy.

Feature party
There's no shortage of applications on the Aino -- Sony Ericsson has stuffed in every feature it could think of. Unfortunately, it hasn't designed the user interface to handle it all, so menus often feel like they offer too many options. For example, when we selected 'organiser', which is represented by a calendar-page icon on the main menu, we expected to see the calendar. Instead, we saw a list of 14 more options, including video-calling and file-transfer features, and a folder containing the apps we installed from Sony Ericsson's app store.