Phone Review - Samsung Tocco Lite

After a drunken incident with my Nokia 6300 involving some flailing limbs and a pint of water, I decided it was time for a new phone. After coming to the conclusion that a touchscreen was the way to go I then had to pick between a Samsung Tocco Lite and an LG Cookie. Having looked at online reviews there didn’t seem to be much to choose between then two. What was holding me back from buying the Tocco was that I knew two people who bought the old version and had had their memory completely wiped just out of the blue one day. But it was just such a nicer phone than the Cookie, so much more elegant; as my sister pointed out, the Cookie did look kind of childish. When it came to actually buying, I asked the woman in store and she said the old Toccos were rubbish but that the new one didn’t have those problems and was a million times better than the Cookie. Problem solved!

Dimensions: 53 x 104 x 12 mm

Weight: 94 g

The Samsung Tocco Lite has many features that I’ve wanted in a phone for a long time. It has a good camera, 3.2 megapixels, which is the same as my old camera (which is rubbish for a camera but not so bad for a phone). I haven’t got around to uploading any of the photos I’ve taken but from, the quality on the screen I can tell that they are good. A massive improvement on the camera on my last phone, and it has lots of different settings so you can edit your photos whilst they are still on the phone. (When I have uploaded some of my photos I will put one onto here as a demonstration).

The thing that this Samsung has that I’ve always wanted from a phone is a USB that connects the phone to the PC. I know that many phones come with a USB, especially phones that are designed with high specifications for music or cameras like Sony Ericssons. But if, like me, you have a camera for taking photos and an mp3/iPod to listen to music, and just want to be able to put a few songs on your phone as a ring/message tone, then this is great.

There is also a widget on this phone, and for those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s a shortcut that you can scroll down to quickly get to the applications you use most. You can customize it (which I only learned to do today) so that the things that are actually important (creating a message, organiser) are right there. I think this is becoming common on many Samsungs now. This saves you having to go all the way through the menu to find what you want. You can also drag shortcut icons onto the screen if you wanted everything to be that bit easier. Making it look more like a computer desktop. I found that doing this makes the screen look too cluttered but if this doesn’t bother you then it’s another excellent feature.

When writing messages you can choose to have your keyboard set out like a regular phone keypad with either predictive text or non-predictive text (is there a word for this) or you can turn the phone on its side and it produces a QWERTY keyboard. I still prefer to use predictive text, but my mum who bought this phone yesterday prefers the QWERTY keyboard.

Problems

So far I have not had any major problems with the Samsung Tocco Lite, or found anything that I’m not happy with. But I’ll just flag up a few things to be aware of:

Firstly, even on the highest settings the vibrate isn’t very strong. If you rely on feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket on just rely on the vibrate generally, the chances are you won’t feel/hear it. I wouldn’t say this is a massive problem and certainly not a reason not to buy this phone, it was just very noticeable to me since I was used to jumping out of my skin on a daily basis when my old phone vibrated across the table.

The only other problem really worth mentioning is that sometimes you have to touch the screen in just the right place in order to touch the button you mean. I notice this especially when adding words to the dictionary through predictive text. The area you need to touch is really small and sometimes the phone just doesn’t seem to recognise what I am doing and it takes a while before I can get it to press the button I mean.

To anyone wondering if they are ready to branch out into the world of touchscreen phones I would say that this phone definitely makes it easy. The buttons, although touchscreen, are much bigger than you would get on a blackberry or one of these other phones that pretends to be one. I’ve not been left wanting for anything on this phone. It has all the things I’ve wanted but failed to find in a phone before. The screen is very big and the colour quality is very good. Like purchasing a phone from a manufacturer you’re not familiar with, it takes a certain amount of getting used to but one you’ve got the hang of it it’s good fun and easy to use. I would recommend this to anyone!