Toshiba - TG01 review
oversized Windows Mobile smartphone
Review date: 10 November, 2009. Review by: Sandra Vogel
The physical design is both unusual and pleasant in that it sports a screen measuring a vast 4.1-inches across diagonal corners. Its 800 x 480 pixels are a good resolution for a smartphone, but in our small hands it felt a little clunky and we couldn't reach from one side to the other to prod at the screen one-handed.
Of course, the big screen makes for large hardware. The TG01 measures 130mm tall and 70mm wide, but it is thin at just 9.9mm. In the hand it feels less like a smartphone and more like a personal media player. A downside, if you are a fan of using a stylus to tap out text, is that the chassis doesn't house one. Instead you are provided with a stylus that hangs off the shell on a lanyard.
The front fascia also houses Home and Back keys and a bar along which you can run a finger to zoom. This is most useful when browsing the web, but it didn't seem to function when we were viewing pictures.
The TG01 has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in, as well as a GPS antenna. The large screen is ideal for things like mapping via Google Maps or satnav software. An accelerometer ensures the screen switches orientations as you turn the TG01 in your hand. This is really useful, but we found that the entire screen would blank during the switching process, which was rather unnerving at first.
The accelerometer has been used to add some unusual features to the TG01. You can answer a call by shaking the handset, though we don't know why that was thought of as a good idea. More usefully you can zoom into a web page by tilting the TG01 as you press on the zoom strip under the screen, and activate the Windows Mobile task manager by tapping the back of the handset twice.
Memory is generous, with an 8GB microSD card supplied to supplement the internal 512MB of ROM and 256MB of RAM. On the downside you need to remove the battery to get to the microSD card slot. There is a 3.2-megapixel camera and the TG01 is an HSDPA device with an ultra-fast Snapdragon 1Ghz processor.
Unfortunately all the good features are let down by Toshiba's remarkably poor user interface. Sitting on top of Windows Mobile, it relies on eight application/service groups of which three are visible at a time. You finger-pan to see more. Each group displays three items of content, such as applications, at once and you can finger-pan to see more.
It is an incredibly irritating system, almost always involving more work than is really necessary to get to the application you want, and to add insult to injury it is not very good looking. Toshiba has not made the most of the screen space available and should have come up with a much more innovative user interface capable of displaying a lot more user options at once.
Our review sample of the TG01 ran Windows Mobile 6.1. The device has very recently been refreshed to run the new Windows Mobile 6.5. Whether some of the issues have been ironed out along the way we don't know. But we hope so.
Verdict
With its huge screen and fast processor the TG01 ought to be a ground-breaking, exciting device. It is the former, but a poor user interface means is definitely not the latter, which is a great pity.
Company: Toshiba
Contact: 0844 8478944
