Gadgetrepublic.com - Gadget Review

Only a year ago, it was iPhone this and iPhone that when people were talking about the touchscreen phone. However, as this technology comes into the mainstream we all expect an affordable and good-quality touchscreen, multimedia experience, and this is the market that the Tocco Lite is aimed squarely at.

I have a few quibbles about this smartphone but I'll start with the good stuff: the Tocco Lite may have the same user interface as the original Tocco but I can tell the difference in terms of responsiveness - I am convinced that the Tocco Lite's touch is faster and more accurate.

Secondly, I applaud Samsung's usual flair for packing in plenty of clever little tricks into the handset's 3.2-megapixel camera.

You have your various scene modes including night, sports, sunset and text. You have shooting modes including panoroma, mosaic and smile shot, and you have some effects including sepia, negative and watercolour, as well as white balance settings.

Then there's the handy tap to upload to Facebook and Flickr. This phone is obviously not for the business user or smartphone enthusiast, but then again, it never claimed to be. It is ideal for the now average phone user or generation 'Y bother' as I like to call them. They want to text, check their Facebook, listen to music and capture photos and video to upload to wherever their friends are.

Overall, I don't get the whole drag 'n drop widget concept Samsung are pushing with the Tocco Lite - especially not on a screen this size. I can see that customisation is the driving goal, whereby you can have shortcuts to your Facebook, Gmail and so on, but you can just as easily click through from the menu button.

However, uploading is not as quick as I would have liked (although you can opt for MMS length video) because the Tocco Lite is an EDGE phone as opposed to 3G, but at least it does this business quietly in the background, leeting you get on with other things such as checking your Facebook page for the umpteenth time.

Another quibble is the home screen. I would have liked the option to permanently 'fix' a few shortcuts to my SMS inbox, such as making a call or opening the web browser or my Gmail account.

I know you can drag and drop widgets for Google, Facebook, clocks, calculator, photo viewer and various other bits and bobs for handy shortcuts, but I didn't like the way they moved around, or at least I wouldn't have minded as long as a few basic ones could have sat at the bottom of my homescreen permanently.

Widgets are a good idea, but not on a small handset screen. For me, they were too large and I didn't like that they could overlap and half of the time I accidentally launched them while I was trying to move them around.

Antoher thing about the widgets is that I didn't really see the point of them for some applications. I don't want a widget for my Facebook unless it is small and sits neatly at the bottom of the screen, in which case it is just an icon, or unless it delivers live data like a widget should, giving me the latest status updates or Facebook messages.

Otherwise, I would prefer to simply navigate to the main menu and choose my Facebok, YouTube, Flickr or various other services from here.

Again, to re-emphasise the whole widget thing - these are really just shortcuts that take you to the mobile webpage of the service you are using, so you're not going to get a special Flickr, Gmail or Facebook application because almost everything requiring a web connection is carried out via the web browser, save for the one live weather widget from accuweather.com.

You can download more widgets, but to my dismay I couldn't find one for Twitter.

So who is this phone for? I could safely say for most of the young adult market. My requirements of Outlook connectivity and push Gmail mixed with the experience of self-contained mobile applications for services like Twitter and Facebook means I am not a target market, but it did not stop me from enjoying the camera, radio and simple 'tap twice' zoom for web browsing.

Price: €139 prepay from Vodafone, Meteor and Carphone Warehouse. Available in black, white and pink.

By Marie Boran