Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Samsung F480 Tocco

The Tocco looks somewhat similar to the iPhone, but weighs much lighter at about 100 grams. The phone is fairly slim at 11.6 mm, having a great weight-to-volume ratio and feels good in the hand. Since the Tocco lacks any keypad, the front is largely made up of the large 2.8" touchscreen. The capacitive touchscreen was very comfortable and responsive; but what's really special about this phone is that it also features haptic feedback. The haptic feedback is adjustable; meaning you can adjust the intensity the phone vibrates with as feedback to your touch of a button or menu option. Another speciality of the touchscreen Tocco is the TouchWiz interface, which makes customization of the homescreen as easy as drag-and-drop from a sidebar. Three hardware buttons are present below the screen: 'Call', 'End', and 'Menu'. The sleek design in conjuction with these features is what makes the Tocco a unique Samsung touchscreen.

The Samsung Tocco stands out from the rest of the crowd with a few innovative features. The 5-megapixel camera was one as such. Color reproduction and saturation was just in the right numbers. The LED flash did function well for close night shots. The real surprise Samsung has thrown at us is the Face detection and Smile detection features found only on high-end digital cameras. The camera also featured Image stabilisation, which was an appreciable technical achievement for a slim feature phone. There was sadly no support for VGA video recording. On the multimedia front, the phone was strong with support for most audio and video formats. The Tocco's music player was full-featured and supported Album Art and Tag support. The FM Radio with RDS was another cool addition. The Samsung Tocco has over 220 MB of memory, but there an SDHC compatible microSD slot that took cards up to 16 GB. The screen was comfortable for viewing text, pictures and video clips with its QVGA resolution at 262K colors. The document viewer was there to open DOC, PPT, PDF and Excel files. What was bad about the Tocco was that it lacked an onscreen QWERTY input, there was only support for T9.

The Samsung Tocco is basically a Tri-band GSM handset supporting 900/1800/1900 MHz with GPRS and EDGE class 12. UMTS is supported on the 2100 MHz band in the initial Tocco. A later version, the F480T, also supports 850 MHz for the US. HSDPA support was outstanding, with speeds up to 7.2 Mbps on supported carriers. Local connections can be established through Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP or USB 2.0 Full speed. Wi-Fi and Infrared were absent. The secondary camera present made two-way video calling possible. Despite being a High-speed HSDPA device, the Tocco lacked a sound Web browser. The browser was fast but lacked the power and functionality expected of a modern-day browser. Users who want a high-speed HSDPA modem will like the Samsung Tocco considering what comes included with it.

Under the hood is a 1000 mAh Li-ion battery that powers the Samsung Tocco. Expect a 3G talk time of 3 hours with this slim device. Samsung rates the standby of the Tocco at 250 hours, which is nearly 10 days. While in real life you can use it as a phone for about 3 to 5 days.

The Tocco is available under contract with most carriers. Expect to pay a heavy price if you want an unlocked version. In our opinion, the Tocco is worthy of being bought outright, because Samsung packed quite a punch into the slim handset.