AN OLD-FASHIONED ALTERNATIVE IN A NEW GENERATION OF PHONES

The Samsung Tocco Lite

A great phone for its time, but a little outdated now.  Easy to use though, and combing a touch screen with ‘real’ keys gives you the best of both worlds.

The Tocco Lite is a double-edged sword in terms of what Samsung were up to.  It was their endeavour to bring its widget-based interface to a wider audience, while offering a viable competitive to the heavily popular LG Cookie. Brought onto the market six months later than the Cookie, it should have been more advanced, but actually there’s not a lot of difference between the two handsets. It lacks 3G, WiFi and GPS: features we expect these days, but it has a fun interface with access to Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.  It sports a 3.2 -megapixel camera, video recording, FM radio with RDS, music player, Bluetooth and a virtual QWERTY keyboard.

 Even though the three-inch, 240 x 400 pixel touch-screen is resistive rather than capacitive, it works well, and you can alternate with finger sweeps between three main screens.  All screens can be populated with widgets, of which there are a lot, but they tend to be rather large. As a result, three at a time is about the maximum realistically.  That said, they are simple to manipulate – just drag them from a sidebar and customise your screen.  They give you easy access to apps, and the on-board accelerometer sensor will turn the screen so you can effortlessly alternate between landscape and portrait.

 The Tocco Lite does feature Google Maps, but not having GPS doesn’t make it great, and don’t be in a hurry if you want to browse the web, as it isn’t the fastest handset out there.  If lack of speed doesn’t worry you, then the browser is actually quite satisfactory.

The combination of virtual and real keys makes the phone a dream to use.  The virtual QWERTY keyboard is a piece of cake to use but it’s quite satisfying having a button to press when it comes to ‘call’, ‘send’ and ‘select’. It’s also great being able to choose the traditional way of texting or to switch to QWERTY.
 
 Amusingly, the phone features Samsung’s ‘Smile Shot’, which lets you take your picture when the camera decides your victim, sorry, subject, is smiling.  How does it know?  Beats me, but seeing as how the camera also sports digital zoom, it must be sure!  You are also able to edit your photos actually on the camera itself, which is good.
 
The memory for this phone is expandable with a microSD card to 16GB, and seeing as there is a camcorder – albeit not a very sophisticated one, you may need it.  Sound quality is surprisingly good, with virtual 3D surround effect, support for DNSe and an equaliser.
 
 All things considered, this is a good phone.  Certainly not a Bentley, but not a banger either!