Toshiba TG01 Review

Introduction:

Toshiba has been MIA for some time now, but seems quite intent on making it back to the cell phone market by trying to shake the reigning concept of what high-end cell phone hardware means. Does the brute force of the Toshiba TG01, and its 1GHz Snapdragon chipset get along with Windows Mobile, probably the best business oriented operating system as of now? Is the result a marvel of modern technology? Can the gigantic 4.1-inch screen win over customers and pip competition at the post? Read on to find out.

Here's what we found in the box of our Toshiba TG01:

• Toshiba TG01
• 8GB microSD card + adapter
• Charger
• Stylus
• 3.5mm headset with a converter to microUSB
• microUSB cable
• Cable for connecting with a USB device
• Getting Started CD
• Software CD
• Getting Started manual

Design:

We would be lying if we said the design of the TG01 is something we have seen often. First, we cannot pass any judgment relating to what optimal size means in the case of cell phones, but what we can say indeed is that handsets are supposed to be comfortable to carry around. Bringing along your new Japanese friend into your pocket is actually a viable an option, because the handset is extremely thin, just 9.9mm. Well, provided you keep away from tight pockets and snugly fitting clothes. Using it with one hand is a problem however, due to its respectful length and width, 129mm and 70mm respectively.



You can compare the Toshiba TG01 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.


The huge 4.1-inch display is absolutely… huge!

It seems the impressive 4.1-inch touch sensitive screen with a resolution of 480x800 pixels is the only reason behind Toshiba´s decision to come up with a mammoth device. You can´t quite figure how big this means? It´s so big that the standard Windows Mobile icons are actually handy to press. It´s this big. You won´t have any troubles hitting scroll bars or Xs to close windows. Doing such things is now a child´s play, but this is certainly not the case when it comes to developing a screen technology that allows users to properly use their handsets in direct sunlight, at least judging by many devices from various manufacturers. You will have to do some heavy peering until you manage to read the text on the screen of the TG01 in such cases. The sticky penchant for fingerprints that similar devices seem to suffer from has been curbed here and all things considered, you will need to clean the display substantially less often than with similar devices.

There are two touch sensitive buttons below the display to get to the home screen or make a step back in the menus. The zoom bar sticks out a mile, but we´ll talk about it later. The trim that frames the phone makes for an interesting design element. Its part onto the left hand side of the phone houses the power on and volume rocker buttons, while the camera shutter and microUSB port are on the opposite. There is nothing thrilling on the back, just a 3.2-megapixel camera, loudspeaker and both the manufacturer´s and carrier´s logos. There’s no phone compartment for a stylus (who needs one with such a huge screen anyway?), but you will get a stylus in the box.




Now, this is really annoying, but the only way to get to the microSD card slot is to remove the back cover and battery itself. This is just too bad, because while it doesn’t feel like rocket science, you will need certain skills, nimble fingers and all the patience you can muster. Well, practice makes perfect as they say, so eventually you´ll get used to doing it in time. There is a cable in the box that can be used to connect a USB device to the TG01. Allowing the phone to act as a USB host, we used the cable to bridge it with a USB flash memory and it performed really well.



The TG01 can hardly be referred to as a device that will enchant people with its overall look and is far from being handy to operate with one hand. Well, first impressions tend to be misleading way too often, so let´s take a look under the hood and see if the Toshiba TG01 fits the bill.

Interface:

The Toshiba TG01 runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional that is a marvelous performer when it comes to what business customers need.

Toshiba offers a personalized home screen - 3D Menu.

The manufacturer has equipped the phone with its own home screen that for short, is called 3D Menu. It consists of eight stripes and the phone visualizes three of them at a time. Hold and slide your finger to your left or right to switch between them and you will see an eye-catchy 3D transition effect. The latter is not always an easy thing to do, because you need to be very careful when choosing an empty part of the screen to start the sideway sliding motion, well, if you want this to work of course. Eventually, you will get used to this, but still, the likelihood of erroneously starting up apps instead of moving left and right is not to be underestimated. The stripes are actually different categories, allowing access to relevant functions and they are arranged in the following order on our unit – Phone, Settings, Applications, Orange World, Messaging, Media, Files and Tools. The icons they host look miniature and rather ugly and they all start apps or get you to the corresponding phone function. Sliding your finger upwards reveals all icons belonging to a certain stripe.



Toshiba provides three color themes for the stripes that look equally gaudy. The other personalization options that you have include altering the stripe sequence plus adding, removing and rearranging icons within categories (apart from what´s under Phone).



We know it sounds disappointing, but that´s pretty much everything about 3D Menu. Still, there is a single object, located above all the icons that can show information to your own liking. It can be switched to one the following five modes – missed calls, messages and emails; clock; tasks; calendar and empty space.



You can use on-screen navigational buttons to move the cursor while in the phone browser or navigate throughout menus. They pop up when you drag the Zoom band towards the screen and get hidden when you do the same in the opposite direction. The whole idea is ridiculous and we are not going to comment on it any further.



Everything under the personalized home screen is standard Windows Mobile 6.1 features – unappealing menus full of icons that deliver a multitude of options and zero entertainment to look at.

Phonebook:

Being a business user, you supposedly need a handset that allows storing of staggering number of contacts and overwhelming amount of information about them. The TG01 does deliver. The phonebook memory is virtually limitless and you can enter tons of data – from the company and department of the person, to the names of their children and personal assistant. Unfortunately, we couldn’t locate the option for the names of the assistant´s children and neither were we lucky enough to spot where we were supposed to add the names of a person´s Mom´s lateral branch of the family cousins, although we really need such functionality, so figuratively speaking, we rummaged every nook and cranny of the handset.



As a typical Windows Mobile device, the Toshiba TG01 offers quite decent organizer functionality. You are allowed to store events with varying recurrence pattern, plus you have Notes and Tasks.

Messaging:

Given the huge display, you must be wondering if this is not the cell phone to rule them all with the handiest QWERTY keyboard to date. Buttons are of a decent size, but since the handset measures quite a width, you will probably find reaching them an uphill battle when using one hand only. When we arrived at this part of the review, we were thrilled and turned the phone to landscape, trembling with anticipation to behold the largest screen buttons we had ever feasted our eyes on. Alas, it seems Toshiba has failed to take advantage of the otherwise pretty good opportunity to gain an upper hand with this respect. The landscape QWERTY is handy indeed, but we won´t go as far as to say it´s sight unseen. Still, we need to say we managed not to make too many mistakes even when typing away like really fast.



You can use the screen keyboards to enter short, multimedia and email messages. There´s nothing new about the whole process here and everything feels entirely the same as on any other Windows Mobile Professional device.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the Toshiba TG01 is its 1GHz Snapdragon chipset and you can feel its power while navigating in different menus, lists and applications.

Windows Mobile OS has never been so fast and smoothly running before, ever. 

Our only gripe is the irritatingly sluggish accelerometer when changing the 3D Menu screen orientation. We cannot wait to see how the device stacks up against the competition when it comes to more demanding applications like Internet Explorer.

Internet, connectivity and GPS:

Internet is a major source of information these days and buying handset of the same or similar caliber means you probably need network access almost all the time. You will be able to get down to surfing the Net on the browser, that´s “favored” by many customers – Internet Explorer and you can do it right after you take the Toshiba TG01 out of the box. Now is the proper time to point out that thanks to the snappy processor, this is the first time we have seen Internet Explorer running smoothly, without any hang-ups, lagging or stuttering.

Surfing on Internet Explorer feels as easy as ABC!

Well, there is this trifling problem you know (as you might have guessed already, not that trifling at all). The Zoom band located right below the screen doesn’t work all that smoothly and when you finally manage to attain the maximum zoom level, well, you will end up pretty disappointed at what you have achieved. The problem is that the text on most pages appears way too small and is really hard to read, especially if you are shortsighted. There is a solution, called Magnified Display that will help you see things in larger size, although you would need to zoom in and out all the time, which as we have already mentioned, is not properly implemented in this particular browser. Internet Explorer delivers partial flash support and we have to say that this is perhaps the first time we have seen videos on the computer version of YouTube playing without annoying hang-ups on a cell phone. Content is played smoothly and you can even take pleasure watching videos online. However, we utterly failed at our attempts to play streaming video on other sites, such as Vimeo.



If you don’t mind the small text then using the integrated browser of the Toshiba TG01 won´t be an issue for you.

In case you happen to travel a lot, just keep in mind the Toshiba TG01 is a four-band GSM which allows you to use your device on any GSM network around the world, but you will have 3G network support in Europe and Asia only.

Certainly, the device comes equipped with a GPS receiver, but since out unit has been tailored for Orange, the only GPS software that comes preinstalled is Orange Maps. Installing other apps for navigation is, of course, no problem at all.

Camera and multimedia:

The Toshiba TG01 is equipped with 3.2-megapixel camera, which is not that much given today´s standards, but we have often had the chance to see that megapixel count is not the most important thing to affect the snapshot quality. We wonder if this is the case with the TG01.

The camera interface doesn’t offer many options, but is quite snappy, just like everything else on the device. You can take still pictures and videos at maximum resolution of 2048x1536 and 640x480 pixels respectively. Unfortunately, you need to use the dedicated screen button for focusing, because the camera shutter can´t do that. We tend to think this complicates the matter unnecessarily. 



Snapshot quality is way below the average. Colors look realistic, although overly saturated at times and the level of details is extremely low. Despite the solid amount of image noise, pictures taken indoors in properly lit places are of passable quality. The situation however becomes critical when there is not enough light, which can be expected, because the TG01 doesn’t feature a flash.





The situation is almost the same with video quality and captured content tends to be way too blurry. Audio tracks to videos sound loud, but unclear. All told, the camera of the TG01 is good for nothing – neither for taking still shots, nor capturing video.

Toshiba TG01 sample video at 640x480 pixels resolution

Video playback:

It seems the only good thing we have said about the Japanese contender is the device is really fast. Still, we´ve found out one more thing it´s quite good at – video playback. Toshiba had the ingenuity to add CorePlayer to the list of preloaded software. We do like it, because it features awesome codec support. We are pretty happy with its performance, because the device plays DivX and Xvid videos at the native resolution of the screen. We encountered heavy hang-ups with MP4 files, so you need to convert them to lower resolution if you feel like getting a smooth playback. When we tried to play an HD video, CorePlayer said the maximum supported resolution was 1008x1008 pixels. The huge screen, of course, is awesome when it comes to watching videos and provides quite a pleasing overall experience. Unfortunately, the loudspeaker is rather weak to significantly contribute to the playback performance.

Performance

We´ll be pretty straightforward. Speaking of performance, the  Тоshiba TG01 is head and shoulders above its competitors. Its 1GHz processor allows lightning-fast navigation between menus and applications. The computing power of the TG01 becomes evident with more complex 3D apps. To prove the point, the manufacturer has preloaded the demo version of Need For Speed Undercover for Windows Mobile and we must say it runs without a hitch. Playing 3D titles won´t be a problem on this device, just as we expected. Now, what we need is someone takes care about gameplay, i.e. more titles for it.

We aren´t pleased with the in-call quality at all. During our tests, sound was extremely quiet on our end, so you will simply not be able to carry on a conversation in noisy places using this particular handset. The sound strength was decent on the other hand was decent and the relatively sharp voices failed to produce a lasting effect on us, because we were happy with what we could get. People who will buy the TG01 however, will hardly be pleased with this.

We are of the opinion that the 1,000mAh battery of the Toshiba TG01 is unable to maintain the phone working for a decent amount of time in between consecutive charges. According to the manufacturer, it should be able to keep your phone alive for 5hrs of continuous talk and 276hrs in standby. If you switch on the high performance phone mode however, you will certainly not get the above mentioned times between charges.

Conclusion:

It´s obvious that brute force is not a guarantee for product quality even if this happens to be a high-end smartphone. Yes, 3D games run smoothly on the 1GHz Snapdragon chipset and watching movies on the huge 4.1-inch screen feels awesome, but these are pretty much all advantages of the phone. We cannot turn a blind eye on the discomfort we felt while using the handset due to its bulky size. It´s simply unfit for use with one hand and the level of personalization is superficial and doesn’t deliver anything really new. Throw the mediocre snapshot and the outright bad in-call quality into the deal and we have to admit we wouldn’t go for the TG01 ourselves. Still, if you feel irresistibly attracted by its gigantic screen and ultra-fast processor and ultimately, you decide to get yourself the TG01, just consider installing some other personalization pack for Windows Mobile, say Spb Shell.

When it comes to decent overall size, we need to draw the line somewhere and we do think Toshiba has crossed it with the TG01. We would have liked to see something a tad smaller, more functional and appealing to look at. We do hope the next device by the manufacturer is less bulky and made with more attention to details.

Toshiba TG01 Video Review: