samsung-tocco-lite-mobile-phone-imagesSamsung Tocco Lite aka Samsung S5230 Star is aimed at the mid-range touchscreen mobile phone market which is already occupied by LG Cookie. The two phones are broadly similar in specs and price range. But there is something in Samsung’s new baby that clears the cookies (pun intended) out of the market. We, at gadgetophilia got a hands on experience with Samsung Tocco Lite and jotted down its unique and not so unique features under one roof. Let’s move on then.

Design

The design of the phone is very much similar to the LG KP 500 Cookie both in size and styling. It has pocket friendly dimensions of 104X53X11.9 mm and is very lightweight at 93.5g. The screens are identical 3 inch touchscreens. There are 3 physical keys in the front with the back button that is found in the Tocco Ultra Touch. The other two buttons are used for call, send and select. Like other Samsung phones, you have to remove the battery to insert the micro SD card so hot swapping is not possible.

Touchscreen

The 3.0 inch touchscreen has a good resolution of 240X400 pixels and shows 256K colors. The pictures come out to be truly clear and vibrant in its excellent screen but not like those amazing 16M AMOLED displays. The touchscreen is resistive and pressure sensitive so that you can use both your fingers or stylus to select things in the screen which is not possible in capacitive touchscreen which responds only to finger touches. The use of stylus also lets you use its handwriting recognition system. Using the virtual keyboard for text entry is also comfortable although heavy texters will not be impressed with its not-so-high accuracy.

Interface

The Samsung TouchWiz interface that we find in every Samsung moble phone, seems to get matured with a few improvements on the earlier version. First of all, there is three standby screens. You can move from one to the other by swiping your finger across the screen. Each screen can be customized with its own wallpaper and widgets which are basically shortcuts to applications on the device. The built in accelerometer sensor automatically rotates the screen when you turn the phone on its side switching between landscape and portrait mode.

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Camera

The phone is not a camera oriented phone like Samsung Pixon but still it manages to get good pictures with its 3.1 MP Camera. It also has good camera features like smile detection to capture the smiling faces of your loved ones at a reasonably high resolution of 2048X1536 pixels. There is also a built in flash light which makes the camera capable of taking picture at low lights. It also shoots high quality QVGA video at 15 fps.

Music and video

The phone is capable of delivering virtual surround sound with its Digital Natural Sound Engine or DNSe. The music player is fully featured and supports MP3/WMA/AAC audio file formats. The FM Radio is nice and is equipped with RDS facility. The 16GB memory capacity via microSD card is enough to store all of  your favorite music and videos. The video player supports popular video formats like H.263/H.264/MPEG4.

Connectivity

The phone supports quad band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 bands which means it can be used with any GSM network around the world. It has standard Bluetooth with A2DP and a 2.0 USB Port for easy connectivity with PC.

Internet Capabilities

The web browser is very good and makes excellent use of the large screen with easy access to RSS feeds, Google Search, Google Mail and Google Maps. There are also widgets for popular web apps such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. But its lacks WiFi or 3G connectivity which makes features like YouTube very slow and jerky. You have to make do with its EDGE technology for high speed internet. The browser is equipped with technologies like wap, html and xhtml for smooth internet browsing.

Battery Life

The phone is powered by a standard 1000 mAh Li Ion Battery which is not like those heavy duty batteries found in Omnia or Tocco Ultra but you have to keep in mind that the phone has less devices to power up. For this reason it manages to juice out reasonably good battery life if you don’t compare it to the ancient Nokia phones.
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Conclusion

The Samsung Tocco Lite offers a complete mobile experience with its good music player, acceptable camera and pleasant touchscreen experience with a competitive price tag. The lack of high end features like WiFi and 3G HSDPA Connectivity may distract many potential buyers but you shouldn’t expect it from a budget phone like this. At the end of the day it is a fabulous phone providing value for the money.