The Samsung Tocco Lite aims to take the touchscreen to thestreets. Its biggest drawback is its lack of support for 3G, but it's a surprisingly good phone, considering its bargain price. Its resistive touchscreen is vivid and snappy,and it's got some fun widgets to keep things interesting.
Samsung Tocco Lite
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Lite is available from free on a £12-per-monthcontract with VirginMedia, or from £130 on Virgin Media's pay-as-you-go plan.
Screen
The Lite is a pocket-friendly phone that mostly consists of screen. By ditching the keypad, Samsung has managedto fit a 72mm (3-inch) touchscreen onto a palm-sized pipsqueak.
The screen is bright, with bold colours -- althoughit's no match for the AMOLED screen of its much more expensive cousin, theTocco Ultra. It's also a resistive touchscreen, which we usually hate - - you need to exert pressure to make them respond, and they feel rather squishy,so they seem less responsive than capacitive touchscreens. But theLite impressed us with its responsiveness. We found typing and dialling pleasantand quick, and we didn't feel the need to press hard with a fingernail or stylus.For such an inexpensive phone,the quality of the screen was a very pleasant surprise.
With such a good screen, Web browsing and watching videosshould be a pleasure. But the Lite has no 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity, soit's slow to get online or download files. We tried out some YouTube videos andthey were a tiny, garbled mess because of the extreme compression required. Wealso tried getting videos on the phone using the USB connection, but the Lite isn't as easy to sync as other Samsung phones we've tried -- our computer struggledto recognise it. We think your best bet is to invest in a microSD cardand load that up with your media instead.
The Lite has a proprietary headphone jack and noadaptor, so we weren't able to test its music player with high-quality headphones.It comes with a pair of very basic, plastic earbuds with a hands-freemicrophone, and, unfortunately, you'll be stuck with them. But the Lite does support a good range ofaudio formats, from MP3 to WAV, and it also has an FM radio.
Camera
The 3.2-megapixel camera doesn't have a flash or LED photo light, soit's no surprise that it struggles in low light, producing very noisy photos. We were happy with the snaps taken in good light, however. As long as we used a steadyhand, we were able to capture acceptable close-ups and shots from further away.Colour and exposure are satisfactory, especially considering this phone's lowprice.
The Lite puts a good range of camera settings at yourdisposal, including a smile-detection and panorama mode. Those modes aren't super-fast,but the smile detection caught our pearly whites perfectly. There's also aphoto editor so that you can adjust, crop and add effects to your snaps.
We sometimes found navigating between the differentoptions difficult, because of the obscure menu icons and lack of labels. Also, some features -- like zooming in -- aren't available when you view a photo from the camera. Instead, you have to close the camera and openthe photo gallery to get that crucial option, and that's a waste of time.
Once you're happy with your snaps, you can take advantageof the phone's built-in links to Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket andFriendster (it's big in Asia) to get them off the phone. Uploads are pretty slow, thanks to the lack of 3G connectivity,but our tests using Facebook worked without a hitch.
Social networking
The Lite also offers quick links to social-networking sites via adedicated section in the menu, and widgets that you can drag onto to the homescreens. But they're just links to mobile versions of the Web sites -- notbuilt-in applications -- so they're not very impressive.
Some of the widgets available are more useful, such as theweather widget, which shows live updates, or the music player, which lets youcontrol your music from the home screen. We just wish that live updates fromsites like Facebook had been included too. It's also easy to accidentally slidethe widgets around the screen with your finger. The Samsungi8910 HD has a lock function to stop this from happening, and it would be good if the Lite had that as well.
Battery life
The Lite's battery kept us tapping for ages, and was barely dented evenafter a full day's testing. Combined with its clear, loud call quality, andresponsive dialling screen, the Tocco Lite has the phone basicscoveredvery well.
Conclusion
Compared to other phones in its price range, Samsung's Tocco Lite is an impressive handset. Although its touchscreen is resistive, it's pleasant to use and responsive,and dialling and texting poses no problems. The user interface is confusing inplaces, but, for the most part, Samsung has kept it simple. The biggest drawbackis the Lite's lack of 3G support, which sometimes leaves you feeling like you're slowly plodding through a muddy field in a pair of wellies.
Edited by Charles Kloet