Curry or pizza? Touchscreen or keyboard? Thanks to the Samsung Tocco Ultra, at least one of our eternal dilemmas has now been solved. It's thefirst mobile to combine atouchscreen with a normal alphanumeric phone keypad -- a great combo forsoft-keyboard haters who want to upgrade to a touchscreen. With a fabulously bright AMOLEDscreen, an 8-megapixel camera, speedy HSDPA Web browsing and built-in GPS, the ToccoUltra won't disappoint the most demanding user.
Samsung Tocco Ultra
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Tocco Ultra is available for free on a £35-per-month contract with Orange,T-Mobile or O2, or from £350 on a pay-as-you-go deal with O2.
Racing stripes
The Tocco Ultra is clad in dark grey and red -- a brave choice that we think succeeds. It's mostly grey when closed, with a brushed look on the front andthe A-Team-van racing stripe that characterises some of Samsung's other 2009handsets, like the Lucido.Sliding open the handset reveals a candy-red keyboard and camera that look positively delicious.
The handset feels very thin at only 12.7mm, especiallyconsidering that it packs in an alphanumeric keypad, touchscreen and 8-megapixel camera. In fact, we found it almost too thin: if you touch the screen while sliding the phone open, you'll inadvertently open apps, but it's hardto grip the wafer-thin sides instead. We think the phone's elegant looks are worth this minor inconvenience, however.
All things bright andbeautiful
The Tocco Ultra sports a 71mm (2.8-inch) AMOLED screen,which ups the awesome level by being as bright and thin as an OLED screen whileconsuming less power. The screen looks fantastic, with goodcontrast, dark blacks and rich colours. Its anti-reflection coating andbrightness mean that it's easy to read even in sunlight.
The AMOLED screen promises to improve battery life, and wefound that the Tocco Ultra stayed perky despite its wealth of power-hungryfeatures. Its battery life is rated at 4 hours of talk time and 350 hours ofstandby, and we found that the Tocco Ultra easily lasted through a full day of heavy usewithout needing to be charged.
Typing your bluesaway
Samsung says the Tocco Ultra is the first handset to combine a touchscreenwith a three-by-four-key alphanumeric keypad. We think this combination is genius. Thephysical keypad is especially useful when you want to do something simple, like dial a call. Analphanumeric keyboard is smaller than a Qwerty one, so the phone can be smaller,and, unless you're into typing longemails, it should suffice.
The keypad itself has four rows of keys, which are almostflat. Despite not being separated by much space, they're large enough so that they're easy to press, and they passed our sausage-finger test.
The alphanumeric soft keypad appears when the slider isclosed, so you don't have to open the phone to type. We found itresponsive, with reasonably-sized keys. We found the keypad userinterface took some getting used to though, with function keys changing frequentlybased on the context. Also, the backspace key is only available on the softkeypad, even when the phone's open. Normally this is fine, but, when we wereentering text in the Web browser, the on-screen options weren't available, sowe couldn't delete. We had to double tap on the text field to open the softkeypad, which was frustrating.
Where the widgets are
The Tocco Ultra's touchscreen is responsive, but it could be evensnappier. When compared with the most responsive handsets, like the iPhone,it felt slightly sluggish, although it compared well against touchscreens like that of theLG Arena KM900.
The Tocco Ultra uses Samsung's TouchWiz UI. Itscrown jewel is a customisable home screen that uses widgets to display photos, media-player controls or upcoming events, for example. You can drag thewidgets onto the home screen from a dock along the side, which slides open andshut with a touch. It's all very flashy and customisable, but we found it couldbe fiddly. We often ended up dragging widgets around the screen insteadof activating them, for example. Also, at times, we found it hard to touch thesmaller icons in the UI accurately.
Also, the UI isn't the most intuitive we'vetried. For example, along with a call and cancel button, the front of thehandset sports a diamond-shaped back button. All it does is go back a step inthe UI, but its shape and position mean that we were endlessly tempted to tryto use it as a four-way navigation button. Over time, we'd probably get accustomedto it, but the Tocco Ultra isn't the easiest handset to use straight out of the box.
But, in general, we love the flexibility of the UI. Not only could we pick which widgets we wanted and place them wherewe liked, we could even move the operator logo on the home screen. We alsolike how menus with many options, like the settings menu, also have keyboardshortcuts -- handy if you're keyboard-orientated.
Light and bright
The Tocco Ultra sports an 8-megapixel camera and, although there's no xenonflash, it has two insanely bright LED photo lights. Our snapshots were brightand clear, with good white balance, although the automatic exposure was set slightly higherthan we'd have liked.
The camera really shines in low-light situations. We found theLED photo lights illuminated the scene well, but we had to becareful to avoid reflections off shiny surfaces. In these situations, shutterlag proved an issue -- there was a delay of about 2 seconds between pressing theshutter button and taking the photo. In bright light, we detectedhardly any shutter delay.
The camera lens comes out when you slide the phone open, soyou can't take pictures when the phone's closed. Because of this, the ToccoUltra is long and thin when taking snaps, which we initially found odd, although it's easyto adapt to. You can also geotag your snaps with their locations, thanks to thebuilt-in GPS.
Get yourself connected
As well as GPS, the Tocco Ultra has 7.2Mbps HSDPA for speedy Web browsing, althoughit lacks Wi-Fi. Built-in Google Maps takes advantage of the phone's connectivity but,without multitouch support, we had to use menus to zoom in on maps or Web pages.
Thanks to the phone's mediaplayer, we certainly didn't get bored. It supports Xvid and DivX video, and MP3 audio, alongside plenty of otherformats. There's even an FM radio to round it all off.
In fact, the Tocco Ultra made us feel like Samsung hadthought of everything. The box includes a microSD card adaptor, soyou can plug the phone's tiny memory card into a card reader and transferfiles. There's also a headphoneadaptor so you can use your own cans with the handset's proprietaryheadphone jack, although it will add about a metre to the length of the cord,which could mean sudden death on the treadmill.
Samsung's synchronisation software is shockingly good,despite the fact that it contains some slightly dodgy English -- itsname, for example, is Samsung New PC Studio, which sounds like it was writtenby the Babel Fish translator. Werarely have a good word to say about most manufacturers' sync software, butSamsung's is powerful and well-designed.
We're not sure that Samsung needed toreinvent the wheel by creating such an innovative user interface, but at least the company did a good job of it and included clear video help. We found transferring music andvideos easy, thanks to drag-and-drop support, and the software helpfullyconverts file formats on the fly. Unfortunately, there's no support for Macs.
Conclusion
The Samsung Tocco Ultra is an innovative take on the touchscreen-phone mania that's sweepingthe nation, combining a pokeable screen with a traditional phone keyboard. Butthis is no novelty mobile: Samsung has packed a huge wealth of features into aslim and sexy handset, including an 8-megapixel camera, GPS and HSDPA, alltopped off with a luscious AMOLED screen.
With so much going on, we found theTocco Ultra's user interface slightly fiddly, and it isn't the easiest phone touse. But we're willing to learn for a phone with this much power and the goodlooks to match.
Edited by Charles Kloet