It's a shame too that the Toshiba overlay doesn't improve your contacts or really pull together your social media offerings like many top-rung handsets how do from the off.
An accelerometer handles aspect shifting, unfortunately blanking out the screen in the process when in Tosh's UI.
This does allow you to swing around the keyboard for portrait or landscape entry. The Toshiba keyboard is better than the default, but it doesn't give you pop-up letter indicators so when using a finger you can't see if you've hit the right key instantly. Small irritants like having to switch to a different screen for numbers or special characters make data entry slower than practical, and doing it with your finger is slow and most likely fraught with errors. In landscape mode the characters are big enough, but the space bar is compressed into a single key space, so is a pain to use.
The keys also only offer a single character each — no press and hold for caps or characters, just a long string of letters, i. The battery life isn't too good either, with a cited 4 hours of talk time. This is a problem that all touchscreen devices have and the TG01 is no exception so you can't be too far from a charger: it's a charge everyday device.
It's all here, which is at least a bonus point. Onboard storage is minimal, but an 8GB microSD card was bundled in the box with this Orange phone and could easily be expanded on. The microSD card slot is under the back, behind the battery, so not really designed to be swapped in and out regularly.
Toshiba has announced its latest stab at taking on the mobile phone market with the TG But can the new touchscreen mobile phone that promises to "revolutionise the mobile entertainment world" really crack the market dominated by so many other players? We managed to get a brief hands on with the new phone. Okay - when we say brief we mean it.
We had a about 10 minutes with the phone in total while filming a walk-through for Megawhat, but that time did allow us to get all touchy feely with the interface and therefore share some of our experiences with you, our lovely readers. So what do you get? Well virtually everything it seems. The screen is the big wow factor here; it's a 4. In reality the screen is big and crisp although not multi-touch enabled. Toshiba reckon they've taken the technology normally found in its REGZA range, and crunched it down into this handset - a 4.
With that in mind you'll get colour matching, LCD backlight control, colour image control and dynamic gamma correction controls. The result is that video and gaming playback is good - BlackBerry Storm good - and with a bigger screen you will get more of a movie experience than, say, the iPhone. It also highlights just how much of a stop gap Windows Mobile 6. The addition of a neat slide-to-unlock gesture, a pretty, finger-sized list of functions on the homescreen, and an easier to navigate programs menu are all well and good, but when playing music presents you with the horror that is the inbuilt media player, or when clicking on the time gives a list of tiny little tick boxes to adjust it with, any sense that Windows Phone is a competitive mobile phone operating system in this day and age go right out the window.
Powerful, stable, and backwards compatible it may be, but unless you absolutely have to use it, we very strongly suggest you steer clear of it, especially on the TG Toshiba has attempted to give the original TG01 a new lease of life by replacing its Windows Mobile 6. However, on no front has this resulted in a successful phone.
Its large screen and fast processor could be useful if you want your phone to be a true mobile workhorse, but then if you want that you should get the HTC HD2.
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It's also bizarrely one of the most pocketable phones, as long as you have deep pockets, so perhaps the chassis size isn't as much to worry about. The button layout on the sides of the phone is a little weird, with the power and volume controls down the left hand edge and the camera and micro-USB socket covered by a hard-to-close flap on the right. The front of the device, right at the bottom, features three touch sensitive offerings — the home and back buttons, and the touch sensitive bar that used for dragging up the Free Pad, in a similar way to the Palm Pre and its gesture zone, and for zooming in and out of web pages.
The call and terminate buttons are placed on the touchscreen itself, as well as the softkey options too, and are slightly to small to press easily on the go, although if you stop and make you're hitting the right place it's no big deal. The back of the TG01, featuring the 3. Overall, the lightness and size of the phone are the first things you notice when picking it up.
The buttons are nicely flush to the chassis, and are easy-ish to find and press while still maintaining the minimalist design. It's not going to be a phone to every customer's taste, but at least Tosh, having come up with this design, has implemented it well. Turning the phone on takes quite some time, especially the first time you switch it on. Apart from displaying a Toshiba logo, the TG01 appears to have frozen, and most people who buy it will probably go through a brief period of worry that they have broken it.
The screen, a WVGA resistive effort, is only reasonably responsive, although viewing anything on the screen is clear and pin sharp. Swiping through menus or tapping on a certain icon is a bit of a hit and miss experience however, and certainly not up there in the iPhone 3GS or Palm Pre leagues.
Indeed Toshiba has employed some of its TV technologies, including dynamic backlight control, colour matching, and dynamic gamma correction, to enhance video playback.
It really is impressive stuff. Where something like the HTC Touch Pro 2 has a similar resolution, its screen is too small to use comfortably with your fingers. That said, the interface tweaks that have been made are very welcome. There are also custom finger-friendly keyboards for easier touch typing, though these are particularly poor examples.
Toshiba has also implemented a custom home screen but this either needs to be ditched or heavily overhauled as quickly as possible. The idea is that it shows three of the blinds at any one time and by swiping your finger across the screen you can flip along to the next blind.
You can then extend the list of shortcuts on each blind by dragging it up the length of the blind. Once you add in the fact that this screen feels unresponsive compared to the capacitive ones of the iPhone, HTC Magic, and Palm Pre and you have a device that pretty much falls flat on its face in terms of usability.
Any basic phone task like dialling a number, writing a text message, setting an alarm, and playing some music, is an absolute chore. Unfortunately, even this aspect of the device is not without fault. We regularly encountered crashes and slow-downs and there was such a derth of native apps and no app store that out of the box it was difficult to take advantage of this speed.
Another problem was battery life. If Toshiba could have crammed in mAh cell we think it would make all the difference.
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