I love costly electronic toys; in the past several months I’ve bought myself a Nintendo DS, an MP3 player and this Samsung Tocco Lite (GTS 5230) for no other reason than being able to. I bought one, a few weeks back despite having a functional Sony Ericsson C902, a wonderful phone if I do say so myself. It cost me £115 plus a 4 GB memory card and £20 credit on Orange at the time I bought it.
The Tocco comes in a small variety of colors and unlike majority of phones it has only 7 buttons on it together (two volume, a hold, a camera, two soft keys and a back button) instead depending on the touch screen fad that has become prevalent in current times. I must say that Samsung have created a very good-looking phone that places modest and sexy together in an understated and lustrous design that looks very nice without looking dramatic. Mine is in jet black with silver trim and it looks brilliant.
The first thing most people do following setting up a phone is to pull out the camera and give it a shot; it’s like an unwritten law when it comes to buying a new phone. Though the quality of the camera (3.2MP) is normally fine, for some reason the colors look too saturated and i must say that when compared to the 5mp of my C902 it looks very poor. For those wanting a camera phone I think I
should advise straight away that this is not the best camera phone; even the lower level Sony’s such as the K700i have better cameras on them to be frank.
After opening the menu (click menu on the phones main page) I got 12 labeled icons. I found the layout to be simple but also pleasing; it allowed me easy access to everything I needed from the phonebook to the messaging. Selecting one of the icons led to the next menus which are all arranged as lists. Though other people may find this kind of layout a bit primitive, I found it surprisingly adequate. It wasn’t overly complicated, and I could even guess where stuff was despite the fact that I had never used a Samsung before. This is to say that it was very intuitive, and I wish more phones had stuck to this kind of layout in this day and age. Using this phone’s menu was so simple that it seemed like second nature.
While writing a text the phone shows a “virtual keyboard”, and I found that it worked very well with predictive text input (T9). It was very accurate, and also very intuitive in coming up with the word that I had intended to write before I finish writing it. I feel that people who have been used to writing text messages without T9 may find it a bit annoying, as would people who type using unconventional language whose words aren’t in the dictionary.
However, I personally found it to be very good and it took me a much shorter time writing texts on this phone The phone doesn’t have 3G internet. For quite a while I’ve been using 3G with my Sony and what seems frankly weird to me is that in the face of 3G being faster, EDGE can sometimes beat it for similar head to head on some pages. Also EDGE for some reason has an improved range where I live. This is something I use a lot as I work a lot online with my phones. As a result I require them to be simple to use on line. Sadly though the Tocco sometimes seems quite frustrating to use online; while trying to scroll up and down web pages (using Opera) the pages appear to find it easier to slide left and right and look askew, an annoying feature if nothing else that makes web browsing irritating.
So obviously the touch screen, I’ve saved this for last as it’s really quite 2 fold in my views. I’ll start with the point that the phone does not come with a stylus and, well, I have very thick fingers with flat tips, making precise presses a difficult task at the best of times. So I had to go and buy some DS styluses to use with this phone. The difference from my chubby distorted fingers to the pointed tip of the stylus was immense. the stylus was around ...
