Toshiba TG01 smartphone

t's big and it's thin and fast, but it can be a bugger to use.

Review It seems like it's been a long time coming, but the TG01 is finally here. Toshiba's latest venture into the smart phone market is a Windows Mobile device but, in terms of size, looks unlike anything we've ever seen.

Toshiba's TG01

It’s bigger, thinner and, according to Toshiba, faster any other phone out there, thanks to its 1GHz processor. The TG01 also has HSDPA 3G (7.2Mbps), Wi-Fi, A-GPS and a 3.2Mp camera, which ought to put it in the front running with the best of the latest rash of high-end smart phones. It ought to, but appearances can be deceiving.

Yes indeed, the Toshiba TG01 is certainly bigger than the rest, and thinner too, at 130x70x9.9mm, just a whisker under the magic 1cm line. It's no heavyweight either at 129g, which makes it surprisingly pocketable. Admittedly, it's a bit awkward for a jeans pocket perhaps, but its slimness means that it will fit very nicely into the inside breast pocket of a suit.

The LCD touchscreen is, frankly, huge at 4.1in and dominates the front of the device. This 800 x 480 pixel WVGA display doesn't even extend to the edges, as there’s an extensive border around it. Above it are the loudspeaker and an LED with three warning colours: red for low battery or charging, blue for call or message waiting and green for sleep mode.

Below the screen are touch-sensitive home and back keys, plus a zoom bar for use while browsing. If you flick your finger onto the screen from the zoom bar you'll also bring up an additional onscreen navpad, with direction arrows and hot keys – very nice, but we couldn't see much use for it on a touchscreen phone.

Certainly thin, but too wide for a comfy fit in most pockets

The whole unit is wrapped in a pleasantly tactile and sturdy rubberised plastic case. A chrome-look strip runs all the way round the sides, highlighting a power button and volume rocker, camera shutter button and a covered micro USB slot. On the back is the lens for the 3.2Mp camera, crammed up at one end, and there's a little slot, which is possibly for there for ventilation, but it does mean that your phone's innards are exposed to stray bits of dust and fluff.

The TG01 runs on the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS, but as with most modern WinMo handsets, Toshiba has installed its own distinctive user-friendly skin on top. The Toshiba Today page includes eight 'stripes' with room for up to ten widgets in each – phone, settings, applications, internet, messaging, media, files and tools. Three stripes are displayed at any one time and you brush the screen sideways to access the others

Toshiba's stripy skin user interface

Orange has the TG01 exclusively for now, and offers its own alternative home screen with widgets appearing as a scrolling bar to the left of the screen – you can brush your finger along the screen to scroll through them, or press them directly. Call start and end buttons appear at the bottom of the screen in both modes, along with two programmable soft keys.

So far, so good. There is, however, a clue to the TG01's Achilles heel in the box. Toshiba has included a stylus, despite saying that it won't be needed. While you won't need the stylus for most of the top-line navigation, featuring thumb-friendly widgets, you will need it once you get into the Windows Mobile menus, lying just below the surface.

The resistive touchscreen could also do with being a bit more sensitive, and more than a few times, we abandoned the theory of thumb-touch access in favour of the precision reality of the stylus. It's a shame, but post-iPhone, we expect touch screens to just work, without the need for any cajoling.

The TG01 is blessed with a meaty Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor – the most powerful we've yet seen on a handset, backed by 256MB Ram. Now, a 1GHz processor seems like a pretty impressive statistic on a handset but, to be honest, we didn't really feel the difference.

True, it didn't lag as badly as some WinMo handsets, the Acer M900 being an especially bad recent offender, but you still don't get the feeling that it zips easily between applications, and each one takes a couple of easy-going seconds to start up. It's not bad, but it's certainly not as big a difference as we were hoping for...

                                                                                                                                (By  reghardware)