Toshiba TG01

Toshiba is nothing if not brave. The smartphone market has never been so strong or varied, and trying to shoulder your way into the action right now is no easy job.

But that’s exactly what Tosh is trying to do with the TG01. And it’s certainly built to make an impression – at 13cm tall and 7cm wide this is a bruiser of a phone, though at a shade under 1cm thick it's still surprisingly pocketable.

The TG01 is the first handset to use Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor, which is designed to deliver top performance and improved battery life. In other areas the news is less good, however. The 3.2MP camera is no better than average, and there’s no flash. Results are decent enough but there’s little flexibility.

The handset’s size is mainly due to its 4.1in WVGA touchscreen, though not entirely so – the screen ends a fair bit from the edge of the device, and Tosh could probably have trimmed around a centimetre either way without reducing screen size.

Either way, this is the biggest screen we’ve seen on a mobile phone by some way. And given that Toshiba makes its own panels, we expected it to be excellent. The reality, however, proved to be good rather than great, with the occasional hint of sluggishness and a slight lack of vitality during our tests on the 800 x 480-pixel display.

Toshiba has tried to make full use of the large screen with its colourful 3D stripe-based UI – similar functions and applications are held within themed vertical stripes, three of which are visible at any time on the home screen.

Switching to others is as simple as a sideways sweep of the finger, or at least that’s the idea. It’s at this point that the TG01’s Achilles’ heel makes its presence felt, and it’s a familiar culprit: Windows Mobile.

Toshiba’s cosmetic window-dressing disguises it somewhat, but you can’t go far before Microsoft’s notoriously touch-unfriendly OS bars your path. The stylus offers some respite, but kills off the TG01’s attempts to come across as fleet-footed and sophisticated through its clever home screens.

The soon-to-be-released version 6.5 of Windows Mobile is a big step forward from Microsoft, and the TG01 badly needs it.

We can’t help but wonder if Toshiba is regretting not allying itself with Google’s Android platform, which has key momentum right now and has been shown to work with the Snapdragon chipset. We’d love to be proved wrong, as there’s a lot about the TG01 that we do like – including a generous specification and extras such as a bundled 8GB microSD card. But sadly, Windows Mobile makes it impossible to recommend.

The TG01 may end up blossoming under Windows Mobile 6.5, or Toshiba might cut its losses and sidle up to Google. Until then, however, it may have to chalk the TG01 down to experience.