The Sony Ericsson Satio is one of the handsets affected

It’s been a rough week for struggling handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson, with issues affecting two of its flagship devices in the UK.

Earlier in the week high street retailers the Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U pulled the Symbian S60-based Satio device from sale after customers began returning the device due to a software issue when using certain applications.

Operators Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3 and O2 are still selling the device, and there is some speculation that those carriers which put their own user interface on the handsets – Orange and Vodafone – are not seeing the problem. This suggests that the bug may be in Sony Ericsson’s own UI layer.

Sony Ericsson said that only a “small number” of consumers have experienced software issues and the company is working quickly to solve the problem.

Then in the last couple of days, Sony Ericsson’s Aino device, which runs the company’s in house developer OS, was also flagged up with software issues affecting the touchscreen interface. The Aino is still on sale in the UK and again, Sony Ericsson claims “only a very small number of handsets” are affected.

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Sony Ericsson Aino

Japanese-Swedish joint venture Sony Ericsson reignited rumours that a PlayStation phone is in the works, when it showed off a handful of new gadgets on Thursday night, including one that interfaces with the PS3.

However, the Aino is a far cry from a PlayStation with a handset form factor, as it only allows users to access the media content on their PS3 over the wifi or cellular network, as well as to watch the PlayTV service over the handset.

Sony Ericsson, which has been struggling of late, having lost fourth position in the handset rankings  to Motorola in the first quarter of the year, is upping its game with the Aino, which also features a full touch screen and an 8.1 megapixel camera.

Also on show at a launch party in London, was the now renamed Satio, which was first introduced in Barcelona in February as the Idou, another touch screen media gadget with a 12 megapixel camera.

This was supported by the W995 Walkman slider handset, which features an 8 megapixel camera, 8GB of storage and a snap on speaker stand to promote the device’s music features.

Finally, there’s the Yari, which Sony Ericsson used to introduce the concept of gesture gaming, which is a bit like the Nintendo Wii, but on a handset.

The device uses its built in accelerometer to push motion based games similar to those found on the iPhone but also tries to be innovative with a motion detection capability that allows users to ‘play’ games in front of the phone’s camera. Although from what we’ve seen, this requires a second pair of hands to pull off successfully.