A Find Music song search function enables you to ID tunes you hear around you, in a Shazam kind of way, and the audio entertainment is complemented by an intuitive onboard FM radio. The audio performance is satisfactory, with reasonable sound quality, despite the basic headset. Bass was a bit flat and it was a touch trebbly but it was generally fine without being exceptional. It’s a shame, though, that without a 3.5mm socket or adapter it’s not easier out of the box to upgrade to better quality headphones.
Without Wi-Fi, YouTube playback is anything but smooth
The 3.2Mp camera is pretty mediocre with its fixed focus often producing images lacking precision and sharpness. Colour reproduction was generally fine, but in bright conditions, some colours appeared oversaturated with some bleed apparent. You can also tinker with shots, using editing tools, and scribble notes on pics. The photo gallery allows a bit of touch browsing and scrolling too. Video capture is typical mobile quality, recording at a maximum 320 x 240 resolution at 15fps, producing low quality, juddery images.
Video playback on the large screen isn’t bad, though the lack of high-speed 3G mobile connectivity or Wi-Fi means it’s more suited to watching sideloaded material than streamed content.
The Samsung browser brings in touch control operation for zooming; holding a finger onscreen and then dragging one way or the other zooms in or out. Alternatively, you can use the zoom/volume controls to go in an out. The browser’s better than most mobiles at this price level without straying into iPhone slick usability. There are control icons onscreen for easy operation, and you can view full screen and in landscape mode. The lack of high-speed data connectivity is a drawback though, giving a very pedestrian performance for accessing full web pages, which can take an age to load up.
Onboard Google Maps is nicely implemented on the device's screen, although with no GPS receiver inside, cellsite triangulation, rather than satellite positioning, is used to get an approximate area fix to within a few hundred metres. Still, handy to have if you’re in unfamiliar territory.
The fixed focus lens delivers mixed results
The Tocco Lite covers the bases for regular organiser features and tools: calendar, memo, task, world clock, calculator and convertor, plus voice recorder and various clock and timer functions are all included. A few games are loaded up too.
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.
