Thinking of junking your digital camera when you next go on a holiday? The Satio, Sony Ericsson’s new wonder-phone with a 12-meg lens, may just fit your bill.

I got a hands-on with SE’s hero phone for this year at a lavish – if rather painful – event on the sidelines of the CommunicAsia show here, and came away pretty impressed. But later on the event. First, the phone.

First impressions: The touch-screen menus are pretty quick to move between features and you get around the dozens of menus without much lag, unlike on earlier touch-screen devices. There’s none of the fancy3D flip stuff you see on LG’s new S-Class devices, but the Symbian-based S60 OS appears to be a big improvement over SE’s previously laggy UIQ operating system. …

It was once called Idou… now it goes by another Japanese robot-sounding name – Satio.

We’re talking about Sony Ericsson’s latest all-in-one, “throw-in-the-kitchen-sink” entertainment phone that is being, well, launched, today.

Actually, we’ve heard about it back at the 3GSM World Congress in February, but Sony Ericsson has now decided to change the name of its new flagship phone.

And it’s trying to tease its fans with some shots of the phone which will come with a whopping 12-meg camera, a 3.5-inch 16:9 screen and Symbian Foundation OS (what’s left on the sink?)

The large-screen gizmo comes in red (or Boudeaux, as SE calls it), as well as black and silver, and features a handy sliding lid to protect the precious lens. No details on price yet from SE, which says the phone will hit the shelves in Singapore in early Q4 2009.

This one is worth waiting for, assuming Google/HTC or Microsoft/HTC does not come up with something stunning before SE does. Even then, those two will find it hard to match the 12-meg camera on the back of the, er, Satio. …