Samsung F480 Tocco
05 JUN 2008
Launch price
from £free
Stuff says
Compact, good-looking and responsive, the Tocco is one of the slickest touchscreen phones out there
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If we’re being honest, this touchscreen madness is getting a little out of hand. Suddenly, Nokia is the only company making phones with buttons, and we’re starting to miss them. But Samsung’s not feeling sentimental – its new Tocco features a revamped touchscreen interface, which is excitingly based on widgets.
We like widgets, much more so than the phone’s name, which is Italian for touch. But trust us, we got off lightly with Tocco – it was previously simply known by its code numbers, ‘F480’.
A widgety world
It’s a good job the interface has been revamped, because Samsung’s previous smartphone interface was tricky to handle.
The Tocco’s got a regular menu of icons, but at the tap of one virtual button you can switch to the widgets – a dock of options that can be dragged on to the main screen as you please. Best of all, the Tocco interface is very fast and responsive, making the phone a cinch to use in most respects.
It also makes the phone very customisable – you can hide or display everything from the clock and reminder icons to the network’s name-check. Other options include games, the phone’s music player and the FM radio.
The Tocco Widgets are cool enough, though it’s a matter of taste whether you’ll prefer this or the icons on the iPhone. And unlike Apple’s first dog-and-bone, this one’s 3G, with spanking 7.2Mbps speeds. This is lucky as, unlike the iPhone, there’s no Wi-Fi on board the Tocco – an oversight, surely?
Small and stylish
On the other hand, it keeps the size down – the Tocco sits much better in the hand than earlier Samsung efforts or the iPhone. The screen is a decent 2.8in number and, although it’s not as colour-rich or high-resolution as Apple’s, still looks great.