The touchscreen user interface is generally straightforward to negotiate. The standby screen has three buttons, pulling up the numberpad, phonebook or menu. The main menu grid is conventional stuff, a tap taking you into sub-menus, mostly with lists of options – like on a regular phone. It should mostly be intuitive for anyone who hasn’t used a touchscreen phone before with haptic feedback affirming each prod.
Camera pics can be toyed with using the touchscreen drawing app
One button option at the foot of the main menu screen takes you into a Photo Contacts carousel of most-used numbers, for quick dialling or messaging. If photos are assigned, these appear next to the name. A quick swipe and tap can be used to browse through and select contacts by image.
Sub-menu lists can be scrolled by finger dragging, and some, such as phonebook contacts, can be searched by pressing a search panel and tapping in letters using a virtual keypad. In the menus there’s usually enough room for fingers to manoeuvre comfortably onscreen. Occasionally, you may find your dawdling digits selecting rather than scrolling mid swipe, but it usually does what’s required without frustration.
Text messaging is reasonably good for a touchscreen phone, with the numberpad suitably spacious for fingers to avoid mistakes, and a clear key layout. There’s also a virtual Qwerty keyboard option when you tilt the phone sideways, which is also relatively roomy and fairly accurate to use, plus two serviceable handwriting recognition alternatives. Conventional keypad users are likely to find the touch method slower and not as effortless – in particular, for altering text, and for adding recipients from the phonebook.
The Tocco Lite has around 106MB of internal storage, and it can take Micro SD memory cards up to 16GB capacity. It can be sync’ed with Windows Media Player 11 on a PC, using a USB cable, or tracks can be dragged over in mass storage mode. Users can download Samsung PC Studio software if they want to use this to manage tracks instead. Bluetooth transfer is another option.
Alas, no 3.5mm headphone jack socket
The music player software, handles audio files adequately, identifying new tracks loaded onto the phone or slipped in on a memory card, and listing them under standard category headings. The audio interface is simple to use and looks presentable, like previous Toccos, though it's no iPod or Walkman. You can tap to control, alter sound effects settings and drag timelines with your finger.
COMMENTS
70% is fair
I've recently bought this phone to ride out the final 7 months an 18 month contract after i knackered my nokia and didn't have insurance (lesson learnt with expensive smart phones!)
I'm really happy with this little touchphone, it is not a smartphone and shouldn't be assumed to be anywhere near that class of phone.
I have to write a lot of text messages each week (100+) to herd the hypothetical sheep who form the hockey team i captain and find it a very easy to type on in both horizontal qwerty and vertical numberpad styles... once you get past the quirks as there are some areas that aren't intuitive, especially using the T9 function. You can really rattle out tex when you get the hang of it
Other points:
Web browser: never used it, why would I? the phone doesn't even have EDGE let alone 3G
Camera: PoS
Build quality: it's plastic and shiny so it feels very light and has scratched up something chronic. The back panel is lightly dimpeled though so is very easy to grip and type one handed.
Alarms: easy to set up and a nice little intuitive swiping motion to turn off the alarm or put it in sleep mode (no one ever reviews alarms but everyone uses them!)
Battery: Awesome, i've never had less than five days and i'm never off the bloomin' thing
the phoneis not perfect, but if you want something that does google maps and all that other gumpf get an iphone or android phone. If you want a perfectly useable everyday phone for naff all money it's cracker
It's OK
I signed up to a new Vodafone contract last week, and got myself the Samsung Jet. I got the to throw in the Pink Tocco Lite for the missus, and I got some major brownie points for it :)
If it had 3G it would have been perfect - I can understand why they ditched wifi, but 3G really cripples a lot of the phone's features.
It handles calls well, the interface is intuative, reasonably quick and stable, and the qwerty keyboard option is very good - Even for my fat thumbs.
Overall, it is a good cheap phone - It's just a shame that it was clearly designed well by a decent engineer before having 3G and WiFi removed by an accountant..........
Couple of observations
I have one, it's alright but the interface can be infuriating at times. e.g. the backspace is right next to "Done" on the qwerty screen, which in turn is right on top of "Send" on the create sms screen behind it. That, coupled with the non-repeating nature of the backspace key (holding it wipes your entire text) means more than a few half-written texts containing something you'd changed your mid about saying ends up getting sent.
Also the accelerometer is crap, but I've yet to use one that isn't.
There's also a few weird eccenticities, like the qwerty keypad not having an ampersand (you have to revert to numpad for that).
The lack of a d-pad means positioning the cursor in text is difficult.
The browser won't render my local bus tracker web site, but the WAP version of the same site causes the phone to crash every time. Joy.
There's no option to lock the widget layout, or line them up, so they all end up half-dragged around the place. Annoying if you're borderline OCD about stuff like that. Also depending on your provider there's often no way to delete unwanted crap (like Yahoo! on O2) from the widgets bar.
All negative points, but just niggles really. On balance I like the phone - just. It's good if like me you rarely use your phone and want something with monumental battery life on a cheapskate contract. Speaking of which, the battery life is the #1 standout feature for me. I make on average 2 five minute calls a day and send half a dozen texts, don't use the MP3 player or anything, and I get 8 days out of it easy. On that front it's like having a Nokia 3210 again.
@Butt Futter: Who shat in your handbag Doris?
Still a 70% rating?
For this waste of perfectly usable plastic? If you're so cheap you don't want to spend more than a hundred bob on a phone, ffs, don't get some cheap knock-off POS. Either stick with your old-fashioned dumb-phone, or get a proper one. Having said that, I'm sure that thousands of imbeciles will plonk down their dad's hard-earned cash to get one, because it comes in pink.
